Newspaper Blackout Poems

Today I stumbled on a great poetry idea for older children:

Newspaper Blackout Poems!

As I was surfing the net for ideas for my Stage 3 ESL students, I came across a website by Austin Kleon who started creating newspaper poems by blacking out words and highlighting phrases.
http://www.austinkleon.com/category/newspaper-blackout-poems/

I trial this with the group, modelling and guiding them to create their first newspaper poem. After reading the first paragraph of a newspaper article titled "Treating Trauma", the students were asked to highlight key phrases and words that they thought best described "trauma'. Following this they had to create their own sentence using the words from the next paragraph to describe trauma.

Here is the result so far...

Treating Trauma

Disasterous events
dreams of smoke and blackness,
pictures of burnt houses
irritable and clingy
life-threatening experience
died, struggling

Permanently damaged,
vulnerable children
with problems

I am excited about this because of the way it teaches students, especially those who have English as an additional language, patterns of useful phrases and descriptions that could be incorporated into their writing.

Exciting times!