Inside Out And Back Again

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“From Prose to Poetry”

In this activity, students will create their own found poetry based on prose fiction text.

Thanhha Lai chose to tell the story of Hà and her family in verse instead of prose. Consider how that choice may have impacted the overall effect of the novel. Using part of a story written in prose, your task is to create a piece of poetry that captures the same elements that the prose does.

• Select a piece of prose text (or use text provided by your teacher) and read it all the way through.
• Decide what you’d like to preserve about that text: the plot? the tone? the characterization?
• Circle or highlight key words that will help you reach your goal. Your intent is to turn this story into a poem by extracting the most important words and images.
• Use the key words you selected to rewrite the text in verse. You may need to add other words so that your poem makes sense, but the result should be shorter than the original prose text.
• Read your poem aloud and then revise it until you like how it sounds. You can also create a design or artwork around your new poem.

Once everyone has a chance to complete the task, share the poems as a class. Compare what different students chose to focus on and how that changed the meaning of their poem. Having seen how stories can move between genres, consider Inside Out and Back Again. Do you think the story is more or less powerful because of the author’s style choice? Why?

Teaching Suggestion: Consider using a piece of text that the students are familiar with. This website contains a number of short stories and fairy tales that are either short or easily shortened. Choosing a familiar text may allow more time for the creative conversion of genres rather than focusing on comprehension and literary analysis. You can also use a piece of nonfiction—perhaps about the historical context of the novel—to complete the same activity.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who struggle with visual or spatial reasoning, consider allowing them to copy words from the text onto index cards that they can easily rearrange as they compose their poems. A model for what the final product looks like may help visual learners.