The Litlab: J. Robert Lennon: The Cat Text
I have to say one thing here: it is not fun to be with me. I like books and things. Tame: that is I. I get no kicks, fly no kites, play no games. Hops and pot are not my things. If you are here, I want you to go away. So what should this dish, this fox want out of me? I sat and picked at the fish and looked at those hands, so white.
J. Robert Lennon has created a whole alternate story using just words from The Cat In The Hat. This would be a great English lesson. You could remix other things as well- AP news articles, poems, song lyrics etc. It’d be fun to have students use each other’s work. Jill would remix Dre’s paper and they’d talk about the different choices they made. That type of thing.
The creativity comes out as a result of the restrictions.
from Kottke.org
photo credit chinkychongka
An excellent creative writing exercise Tom. Now, how could we do it on the computer to make it better? Perhaps a “Cat in the Hat” wiki?
Ben-
I’d probably have kids do it in pairs/teams. So I’d probably use Google docs or a wiki so they could collaborate easily. You’d then have the option of adding images, multimedia elements, links etc. That’d be fun.
If they’re online we can then have an easy voting contest to determine the top story in a variety of categories (most original, most frightening etc.). That’d give us data to use for graphing and charts. That’d give us more student involvement/motivation and some cross-curricular stuff.
Alternately, you put all the words in a wiki and the students cut the words out to build their own story. Maybe they do this in waves based on time while the rest of the class is doing other stuff. This is kind of a “pass the story” type of exercise.
Tom