Today, I took my juniors to the library to look for their Poems in Their Pockets for tomorrow. My great librarian put out the books and socialized with the kids during this process, helping them to pick poems that they might actually like. This is a benefit of having a librarian. Let it go on record that I believe every school should have a librarian that knows about books and cares about kids.

"Do we have to write down the poem, or can I just check out the book?" some of the kids asked.

"Well, the poem has to be in your pocket," I explained, "so you probably have to write it down."

"But what about if I take a picture of it with my cell phone?" they said.

"And then will it be in your pocket?"

"Yes!" they said.

I agreed this would be fine, as long as they could read the poem from the cell phone picture. We checked, and we found that they could. Hooray for technology, once again!

I decided we'd do a Give One Get One with the poems in class tomorrow. This will require the kids to trade poems with each other for awhile. Then at the end of the Give One Get One, they can decide to keep the poem they're holding or trade back for their own. This might be troublesome for the cell phone kids, except I was thinking they could decide to message their photos to each other.

After that, I think they'll have to write a one word poem about the experience. I got this idea from Dorothy Menosky from a comment she wrote on a different literacy challenge blog. Guess what? I've never met Dorothy Menosky, but I follow her on twitter and we're friends on Facebook and I've seen her photographs on JPG and she's given me book recommendations all because of different types of literacy.

I told the juniors they'd be intrisically rewarded for doing PiYP, but they suggested an extrinsic reward, too. I said, why not? I'm thinking of a couple of options involving showing their pocketed poem to as many of the 1900 students in our school as possible.

Thank you literacy challenge. Thanks for changing my April 29th for the better.