In teaching a poetry unit, the image collage can be an effective tool to help reduce the anxiety with which students often approach poetry and to help students think about the images that poems create. The materials needed for this activity include paper, scissors, glue, and a supply of newspapers and magazines. The time required is two class periods.
I use this activity after class discussion of essential elements of poetry, such as imagery, rhythm, tone, and rhyme. I place the necessary materials on a side table and give students a choice of poems from which to create their image collages.
Instructions are simple. Each student is to study the chosen poem and create a collage representing the image or images that he or she sees in the poem, using pictures and parts of pictures cut out from magazines and newspapers. I ask students to have definite ideas of the images their poems create before beginning to arrange their collages. The goal is not merely to create a picture of people or places suggested in the poem, but to re-create the poem's mood and impact. The most creative arrangements may even be able to suggest the rhythm, tone, and rhyme of the poems that inspired them.
When my students are finished, I line their collages up on the chalk tray and let the class try to guess which poem inspired each collage. As part of our discussion, students are to explain what they had in mind in creating their collages and answer classmates' questions about specific parts of the arrangement as they relate to the poem. This leads into discussion of the images used in the poems, the imaginative ways in which students conveyed these images, and, additionally, the different interpretations students sometimes had of the same poem.
Melinda Derrick, Gatlinburg, Tennessee
This teaching idea was originally published in Ideas Plus Book 5 (NCTE, 1987).
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