In this age of texting mania, engage your students in a safe "texting" activity that will produce some "phone-tastic" poetry. Challenge them to write Phone Number Poetry. It's easy, fun, and will produce poetry with a new "ring" to it.
Have each student write his/her phone number vertically on a piece of paper. Each digit represents the number of words to write in that line of the poem. (If the phone number contains a zero, they should write 10 words on that line.) After selecting a topic, they can begin writing their free verse poem.
An alternate idea for this "texting" is to have the digits represent the number of syllables in each line. For older, more capable students, challenge them to write lines of alliteration using 1 of the letters assigned to that number on the phone. If, for example, one of the digits is a 2, an alliterative line could be:
Clever conversations
Or, a line for the digit 4 could be:
Giddy girls gabbing, giggling
The topic of these poems may be one you assign or the choice of the poet. A fun, if obvious, topic is cell phones. With all the smart phones available today, students can expand their thoughts on phones to include games, web browsing, email, maps, photos, videos, yelp, ...
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