A Simple Way to Play with Words

PicLits.com is a fun and simple website that can be a wonderful resource and tool for teachers to use with their students to enable them to not only play with words but increase their vocabulary. "Inspired Picture Writing" is what it calls its goal. Students can choose from many intriguing and beautiful pictures and then use words to create sentences, poetry, or just descriptive writings. Here is an example of a quick PicLit that I made,

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

After choosing a picture, students can drag and drop words onto it to create a mini-poster. Words can be chosen from a preselected list of words that are arranged into categories of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, or universal words. Many of the word choices for each picture are unique to that picture and are wonderful vocabulary words. Students can create their own work through their own choices and they do not have to type the words so their is more time to play and arrange the words in different ways.

There is also a freestyle choice where you can just type and create your own writing. The website also offers mini-lessons. "Write It" gives you tips on basic uses of words, writing simple captions, compound sentences, and writing paragraphs. "Rhyme It" gives some advice on writing raps, writing similes, and poetry writing. "Master It' has more advanced lesson plans.

This is a fun site for all people to try. I see many and various uses for it in a classroom and I think that it will definitely stimulate creativity and expression as well as captivate your student's attention. The pictures can be saved, shared, and e-mailed.