Build Positive Classroom Community through Poetry and Pop Art

Overview

This activity uses photo and drawing paired with poetry to create a unique and personalized piece that highlights the individuality of students, builds confidence, and promotes a positive classroom community as students get to know each other through their words and art. While the lesson is designed for upper elementary (4-6), it could easily be adapted for grade levels above and below as well. This is an adaptation of a popular reading and writing activity centered around the mentor text, The Best Part of Me, by Wendy Ewald. Here, we pair it with Everyone Can Create: Pop Art to bring students' writing to life.

In addition to building confidence and community, using knowledge of characteristics of genres and applying that to author original texts can be found in ELA standards across grade levels. In this lesson, students create an artifact that exercises these skills through photo, drawing, text, and even audio, as they are asked to write an original poem about themselves, then create a pop art style portrait that supports and adds meaning to the writing. 

Structuring the Learning

Traditionally in this lesson, after reading the mentor text, the teacher facilitates a discussion around elements such as rhyme, repetition, and figurative language and how they contribute to the meaning and imagery of the text. Next, students brainstorm and select their own "best part of me" topic for writing and consider how and what they want to communicate as an author. After drafting and revising their poem, they're ready to add their pop art and put it all together for that unique and original product. (Tip: Use a graphic organizer or sentence stems to get students ready to draft.)

By bringing in photography and drawing, students are asked to think about how they can best highlight the subject of the poem, and how to use color and design to draw attention to it so that the imagery feels connected to the writing. This ends up being a really positive and personalized product, and is perfect for extending beyond the classroom and sharing with families during an open house or family literacy night. 

Final Considerations

In creative projects such as this one, it is important to communicate expectations for final products, such as through a rubric - does the poetry demonstrate understanding of genre characteristics and conventions of writing? Does the imagery created add meaning? (Tip: I love to use AI tools like Microsoft Copilot or Magic School AI's Rubric Generator to help draft a rubric that combines content standards and project expectations.)

There are so many options for creating a final product, depending on the intended audience and how the product will be shared. Whenever possible, offer students choice in the outcome, particularly in a deeply personal project such as this one. Students can:

⭐️ Animate the poetry text and the portraits to create a video

⭐️ Create an image using a grid of pop art portraits

⭐️ Design an image using one large portrait on a bright background

⭐️ Record audio of themselves reading their poem

How else might you use writing and art to build community in your classroom? How could you extend this activity into other content areas?