FridgePoems

FridgePoems is the digital version of the magnetic words that cover Americans’ refrigerators. With FridgePoems, users are given a refrigerator with a few different magnetic words that can be arranged on the fridge’s door. To arrange the words, users only need to place their finger on a word and move it to a new place on the door. If users want more words, they will need to zoom out by pinching the screen, and that action reveals a large surrounding area of vocabulary words. Users then select the word they wish to drag onto their refrigerator work space. With FridgePoems, poems and sentences can then be formed from the assortment of words on the refrigerator workspace. The works users create can be saved to the users’ photo galleries or shared via Facebook, email, or messaging. Users can select word groups from different refrigerators, or make in-app purchases to unlock different word packs.

Instructional Ideas

1. Teachers can organize a classroom contest for the most creative poem using this app. When evaluating students’ poetry for the contest, teachers should consider creative word arrangement, themes (e.g., shaping the words in a tree for a holiday poem), word choice, humor, and the use of poetic devices. Also, students can submit their entries by emailing their work to their teacher or by posting it to a class website.
2. Teachers can use this app to have students review the different parts of speech. To do so, teachers should have students browse through all the fridge’s words by zooming out. Next, students are to find five words for each part of speech and group them together on their fridge. At this point, teachers can have students swap iPads with a partner, and it is the partner’s responsibility to check their partner’s work for accuracy.
3. When learning about haikus, students can use this app to experiment with writing their own haiku. (This same process can be done for most other poetic forms.)
4. After studying a text, students can use this app to create a poem in response to the text.
5. After creating a poem using this app, teachers can require students to compose a short text that explains the meaning of the poem they created.

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