Students create acrostic poems to document Covid-19
My students learned at home from March 17 through May 14, 2020 when the school year officially ended. As part of their distance learning back then, I asked students to write a couple of paragraphs every other day or so for a “Life in the Time of Corona” journal.
This journal documented their personal experience during the global pandemic.
I got the idea for students to create these journals thanks to a tweet from Kelly Gallagher in March of 2020, just when things were really starting to slide downhill pandemic-wise. Here’s the assignment sheet I created to guide students through the journal assignment.
To add variety to their journals, I suggested that students illustrate life during the pandemic by creating an acrostic poem… a poem where certain letters in each line spell out a word or phrase. In this case, students used terms such as corona virus, COVID-19, or pandemic, and so on.
As you can see, the acrostic poems students turned in exhibited varying levels of quality. That seems to be a common by-product of distance learning. Several factors affected the amounts of effort students spend on a distance learning assignment.
These factors included:
- Internet access (especially having strong, reliable service)
- Support from parents (who may have to continue to work jobs outside the home)
- Jobs (part-time or other that a student works)
- Family responsibilities (such as students having to care for younger siblings during the day)
Regardless, I’m glad some students chose to make an acrostic poem to add some variety to their journals. It was interesting to see how word choice and ideas revealed the concerns and individual personalities of my students. Enjoy!
Thanks for reading! The 2019-2020 school ended in the strangest way imaginable. It just ended. It had been my first year teaching high school with new curriculum, new students, new co-workers, and new experiences dealing with COVID-19 and distance learning.
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It’s one of our favorite poem activities. I know your students will enjoy it!
A new position in a new school and community is a great deal of change……add the contributing stress of Covid 19…..You managed a lot of plates in the air. Congratulations you managed it very well indeed!
Thanks for reading and for the encouragement! I refer to 2019 as my year of living “changerously,” but 2020 has also lived up to that as well!