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Find a Poem in Your Home

Updated: Jan 26, 2021

This exercise takes things you probably have (magazines, coloring books, empty cereal boxes, books you don’t read anymore) in your home and helps you transform them into your own work of art!

For this activity, you will need:

  • Flat things with words on them (see step 1)

  • Scissors

  • Paper/construction paper

  • Glue is optional but you may want it.


Steps:

1. Find some flat (paper, cardboard, etc.) things no one is using in your home that have words or images you think could be interesting on them. Some things I see when looking around my home are: magazines, empty cereal boxes, books I was going to donate/am done with, paper grocery bags, some shipping boxes, and old birthday cards.

2. Cut out some keywords you like. You can also cut out images if you’d like. You don’t need too many, but you can always cut out more and use them again and again to make more things. Here are mine:



3. Put down some paper and arrange your images (if you have any) in a way that pleases you. You don’t need to glue anything down unless you want to.

Here is what I made:




4. Take just your words you’d like to use in your hands and drop them from above onto the paper (gently enough that you don’t lose them all over the floor). Turn any words that flipped upside down over but leave them where they fell.

This is how mine fell:


This is how I arranged them:

5. At this point, you might have something that you like that reads like a poem. Try reading the words aloud. Do you like it? Is something missing? Do you need more images or words?


6. If something was missing, use your own words to connect the keywords you dropped. Feel free to add or remove images too! You may need to rearrange some of your cut out pieces, or you might want to adjust your images. This is your piece to change into whatever you want. If you want to keep it forever, glue the pieces down, or simply take a photo so you can use the pieces again!


Here is how mine turned out:


By Joy Young

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