Where I'm From - A Video Poem for Teachers

Teachers are amazing humans. Teachers take care of everyone around them, quell fears, and keep marching forward no matter how dire the situation. To show our love for this amazing, exhausting, and vital work that we do, a few creative online teacher friends got together to write a poem. Yes, we wrote a poem together from entirely different parts of the country, and compiled a video version here to share with you.

This poem, entitled “Where I’m From” is inspired by the popular spin offs of George Ella Lyon’s original piece. The poem takes the concept of being “from” a place and associating all kinds of concrete nouns and memories of that place in a variety of stanza and line lengths. For us, we did a version similar to this NPR “crowdsource poem”: it’s a fun way to involve a huge variety of people from all parts of your school community with just a camera and internet access. If you’d like to recreate our experience with your staff, students, or the entire school, here are a few simple steps to take:

1. Post the model/mentor text somewhere where all participants can see it (for me, that’s Google Classroom)

2. Record your own sample stanza. This can be selfie-facing or a voiceover of the camera shooting things that are mentioned in the poem.

3. Set up a Shared Google Drive Folder. Upload your sample.

4. Send out an email with your directions and invite everyone to contribute to the folder.

5. Using a movie editor such as WeVideo (paid), Adobe Spark (free with limits), iMovie, or other video editing platforms that you might like, drag and drop each video into the timeline. Lightly edit to make sure each video smoothly transitions into the next video.

6. Add some music and share!

This is a fun, doable way to connect with your students through both distance learning and in traditional classrooms. Let me know below if you give this a try! Drop your email below and I’ll send over a PRINTABLE COPY of our poem so you can see how the whole thing looks!