Book Spine Poetry - Middle School Book Club!

Did you know April is National Poetry Month?  A few weeks ago I came across a blog post by Travis Jonker on 100 Scope Notes (an SLJ blog) about Book Spine Poetry.  He was calling out for submissions, and I thought this would be a great activity to do with my middle school book club (grades 6-8)!

I showed them an example and set them free in the YA area of the library.  Here are some examples of what they came up with:

("Gorgeous/ Lucky/ Brilliant/ Smile")

*Cute and simple, I like it!

("Fact of Life #31/ Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet/ Skinny/
Withering Tights/ Geek Magnet")

*Huh?

 

("Confessions of a Serial Kisser/ I Was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader/
My Name is Not Easy/ My Mother is a French Fry")

("I'm with Stupid/ Beauty Queens/ Flirt Club")

*Hillarious, btw!

("The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/ The Killer's Cousin/ Impossible")

("The Orange Houses/ After the Moment/ Moonrise/ Midnight/
The End of the World")

("Blood Wound/ Death Sentence/ Okay for Now")

("What Are You Afraid Of?/ The Disappeared/ So.B.It")
*This one's pretty good!

("Fat Angie/ Struck by Lightning/ The Hunger Games")
*LOL

 

 

To be honest, this didn't go as well as I had imagined.  We had already spent about 40 minutes discussing our book of the month, and the kids were pretty wound up.  Some of them went sprinting out of the room to grab books before I had fully explained what we were doing, and they succeeded in making a pretty huge mess of our YA area.  Even though I told them they had to put everything back, I was finding stacks of books just shoved on shelves afterwards, so I wasn't too happy about that.  In the future I think we might do this activity at the beginning of a meeting, rather than the end, before I fill them up with lots of sugar :)  Still, it was a fun activity to try, and I just emailed our submissions in, so I will be excited if they end up posted in the 2014 gallery! 

 

 Be sure to visit 100 Scope Notes to learn how to do this yourself!