New Discovery: Pic Lit!

This week, my kids used a really cool site I discovered (thanks to Twitter)! The site is called Pic Lit. There, you can search a wide variety of inspirational photos and create sentences (or paragraphs) that appear right on top of the photos. What I really like is there are two ways of doing this:

1) A drag and drop with provided words for those writers who need some inspiration


OR


2) A freestyle for writing virtually anything


Since this was the first time my kids had used the site, I just had them write what came to their minds when they say the picture. Here are some of the results:

I told them not to worry about spelling or capitalization this time, so excuse our errors. I just wanted them to be inspired. As I have thought more about this site, I feel like there are TONS of possible uses in the classroom. Some of these include:

• writing a full poem with the picture as a background
• collecting favorite book quotes and writing them into pictures that match
• writing sentences using sensory and figurative language
• writing sentences about "life" and life lessons
• writing themes of books

I needed to create a log in, and then I used our class name as the "Pen Name." When the kids log in, they log in as me, but they are all able to log on simultaneously. There isn't a print feature, so you can have them email you the pictures and then copy and paste the images into word if you want to print them. I use a program called MSWSnap to take pictures of them from the site and then save them. Do what works best for you. 

How do you think you might use Pic Lit in your classroom?