Purpose: Plan, provide a handout, and teach a reading or writing strategy that could be utilized to support comprehension and understanding of text.
Co-PBST Student Objective: CO-PBST: 1.1, 1.4: Develop literacy comprehension strategies which facilitate student understanding of varied materials and text structures and which will enhance student performance on assessments of educational achievement.
Product: One-two page written resource page using provided format and class presentation of strategy plan.
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Name of Strategy: Found Poems
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Description of Strategy: Found Poetry is a strategy that encourages students to closely read and interact with a text. Students read a given work and then go through it again, circling the strongest words or phrases throughout the piece. Students then create a poem using the words they circled from the text. By focusing on close reading and creativity, found poems engage students more deeply in the subject matter they’re studying.
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Rationale and Purpose of Activity: Creating found poetry requires students to go back and read a piece multiple times in order to determine the most powerful portions of the text, thus encouraging close reading. Additionally, students must engage deeply with the key ideas and vocabulary the author chose in order to choose the most powerful elements for their poetry.
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When Activity Would Be Used in Reading/Writing Process: In order to provide maximum benefit to students, found poetry is most useful after reading a text.
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Audience: Found poetry is an excellent activity for students who possess the ability to read and write on independently. Since found poetry boils down a piece of writing to its essence, it can be a particularly useful activity for struggling or otherwise disinterested readers. Still, all students can benefit from the experience of closely reading a text, and the thrill of creating an original work out of a preexisting piece.
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Texts: Found poetry can be used with texts across disciplines and content areas. This strategy can be particularly useful when dealing with particularly dense, dated or complicated texts.
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Steps in Using the Strategy:
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Step 1: Read the piece.
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Step 2: Go back over the text, circling the strongest words in the passage. Keep an eye on particularly powerful verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Cross out any words that are unnecessary.
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Step 3: Choose a strong word or phrase to start the poem. Try to stay true to the author’s original order of words. Utilize line breaks in order to place emphasis on particular words or phrases.
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Step 4: Edit the poem for verb tense. Keep any grammatical additions to a minimum.
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Step 5: Title the poem and compose a final draft, including a citation for the source text.
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Adaptations: Found poetry is an excellent strategy to support struggling readers, SPED students and ELLs. Because it places emphasis on locating the most impactful or important words/phrases in a piece, the ability to read “fluently,” or quickly, is not a primary consideration. This technique can also be adapted to have students work in groups, providing collaborative support for struggling students.

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Activity Strengths and Weaknesses:
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Strengths: Found poetry provides students with the opportunity to create an original piece of work based on an anchor text. By engaging students deeply with the main ideas of a piece, found poetry encourages close reading, while the focus on the particular vocabulary authors use engages students in discussions regarding the author’s intent and further improves their vocabulary and literacy. Found poems also engage the creative impulses that school often ignores. Finally, the fact that there isn’t a “right” answer provides students with the opportunity to experiment with language and form.
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Weaknesses: Getting students over the false belief that poetry is really hard to write and that they can’t do it is a significant hurdle for some students. This technique would be difficult to use with novel or chapter length texts.
Check out The Found Poetry Review for more info! Foundpoetryreview.com
Presented By: Kim Mendelsohn
HIGHLY DEVELOPED 24-25 pts.
 Plan includes all required component and is presented clearly.
 High- level thinking includes in-depth analysis reflecting how the plan can enhance instruction
 Writing is well-organized and free of spelling and grammatical errors.
DEVELOPED 20-23 pts.
 Plan includes all required components.
 In-depth thinking is partially apparent when writer analyzes what findings mean.
 Organization is evident, with few spelling or grammatical errors.
PARTIALLY DEVELOPED 19 & below
 Plan lacks required information as indicated in assignment or is not presented.
 Analysis is minimal.
 Spelling and grammatical errors are evident and hinder understanding of the writing.
 Plan is disorganized, or shorter than required.