Found Poems

A Found Poem or Lifted Poem is a poem that is created by finding and lifting several sentences or phrases from a variety of readings and putting them into a new arrangement, to express a point of view through poetry. My 5th graders wrote their own Lifted Poems after reading three nonfiction books about African American women in history. They pulled two sentences from each book and ended up with unique expressions after synthesizing their comprehension and interest in particular sentences and phrases. To experience another modality, they made cut paper black and white collages using illustrations from the text.