Make your own magnetic poetry kit « Carrie Bartkowiak v. 5.0

Make your own magnetic poetry kit

14 Dec, 2006 Homeschooling

I’ve always wanted one of those magnetic poetry kits that you stick on the fridge. Especially since we started homeschooling; I thought it would be great for the boys to play with while increasing their language skills. Being a tightwad though, I just couldn’t stand the thoughts of paying $15 for each kit - and there are a LOT of different ones!

One idea I had was to get a magnetic strip roll about 1″ or 3/4″ wide and write my own words on it with a Sharpie. That’s definitely one option, but good luck finding magnetic strip rolls that aren’t adhesive on one side. I did find one place at Amazon that sells them in 50-foot rolls, and they’re write-on/wipe-off to boot; but who the hell wants 50 feet of this stuff? Plus then you’ve got your handwriting to contend with. If it’s messy, forget it.

So I was looking around and found this great page. Their idea was to use the Avery magnetic sheets that you can run through your inkjet printer. (Mind you, these are NOT the ones with pre-cut business card shapes.) They give you a template to use to put your words on, and even a pre-made “kid’s words” template that you can use and alter to fit what you are trying to make. This is how I’m going to do it. Woohoo!

Now, want to make it even better?
Use the different font colors in Word to color-code your words. Nouns can be red, verbs can be green, adjectives can be blue, prepositional phrases can be orange… etc etc. You’ll end up with a very colorful and fun learning/teaching/playing activity, at much less than the cost of those pre-made kits. Plus you get to use your own words and put in as many “and”, “ed”, “ing”, and punctuation marks as you want.