Let’s talk about an incredibly adaptable project in which students experiment with creative ideas across modes. It’s easy to plug into a variety of units and times of year, and ready to tap at a moment’s notice. It remixes easily for Valentine’s Day on the horizon, but it could also work well at Halloween, or as part of a creative writing unit, or when you’re reading any verse novel or graphic novel.
This project starts with fiction, moves into verse, and lands in a multimodal combination of verse and imagery. I call it a multimodal flash verse project, informed along the way by the brilliant mode collaborations of Jason Reynolds. Let’s dig into it.
Step One: Students Draft a Short Prose Piece
Start your students off with a workshop to draft a short prose piece.
You can tailor the topic of this prose piece to anything related to the time of year, themes of your current book, essential question for your unit, etc. Take a look at this example, where the piece centers around an interaction with a ghost to go with Jason Reynold’s verse novel, Long Way Down. In this case, we’re really talking about a tiny piece of fiction – just one paragraph.
Just to give you an idea of how easy it is to adjust this project for different purposes, check out this version, also for Long Way Down, in which students started with a longer piece of fiction, focused on the overarching structure of Long Way Down. In this adaptation, the focus was on the life-changing 67 seconds of the novel, with students writing within that same framework of a key moment in someone’s life that changed their path.
Step Two: Students Remix the Prose into Verse
Now, the fun part. Have students go through their prose and star the three most important moments. The moments that could tell the story all by themselves. Invite them to underline the most interesting words and phrases in those moments, then rearrange them (and add to them) to create three separate poems.
Step Three: It Doesn’t End There (Visual Remix)
In an interview with the Kennedy Center about Long Way Down, Jason Reynolds talks about using the page as a canvas for his verse.
To help students do the same, explore how Jason’s verses in Long Way Down (or the verses in other novels-in-verse) use their structure to expand the meaning of the words. Jason Reynolds is ALL OVER Youtube with mentor texts that can help students see the page as a canvas.
So now students work on breaking up their lines to create meaning, and adding color or illustration to amplify meaning. They need to think about how – like Jason Reynolds – they can bring multidimensional meaning to the page – through the words, through the way the words sit, through the color and form of the visuals that surround the words.
Here’s an example of a lighthearted piece of Valentine’s flash fiction drafted into a series of verses, then experimentally remixed three different ways to add visual dimensions.
The Valentine’s Day Version
This project is endlessly variable – you could use it with any verse novel, use it as part of multimodal exploration unit, adapt it to fill one of those odds-and-ends days after testing or before a break, or use it to give an ELA-skills-forward twist on class for a holiday when kids will have trouble focusing on regular work.
Here’s an example of a Valentine’s Day reboot, in which students are invited to write their initial piece of short fiction on anything related to love – love for a person or thing, an activity or dream.
Because Jason Reynolds’ works and collaborations provide such wonderful mentors for this type of multimodal evolution, I suggest that they’re a wonderful element of this project whether or not you’re teaching Reynolds. (I tend to think EVERY student should meet Jason Reynolds in ELA, whether or not you’re able to fit one of his books into your curriculum. Find out more about Jason Reynolds in this comprehensive look at his work and how it can fit into your classes).
So the “love” reboot follows the same pattern we’ve discussed today – the kids write a short piece of prose, then restructure it into verse, then see some of the ways Reynolds has played across modes in collaboration with others as a model, then remix their verses with visuals in whatever style they wish.
Are your wheels turning with possibilities? I’m imagining transcendentalism-themed multimodal flash verse, multimodal memoir flash verse, American dream multimodal flash verse… it’s so easy to craft an initial prompt that takes the project in whatever direction suits your purposes.
I’m also imagining ways to integrate even more modes – what if the first column was prose, and the second two were verse, all illuminated with visuals, and a QR code sat perched in the corner leading the reader to hear a musical theme, written by the student over on Chrome Music Lab Songmaker, that helps illuminate the meaning of the piece? What if students created connected paintings and then stuck the cut out words of their verses into the paint, creating a gallery of flash verse in the hallway of your building? What if the three verses sat on a student-created web page with time lapse videos playing out beneath each one?
OK, I better leave it there or I could go on all day. And I know you’re imagining all the possibilities too.
