Be on the lookout: The small glass bottles have a cork top and the poems wrapped up inside of them." />
Be on the lookout: The small glass bottles have a cork top and the poems wrapped up inside of them.
Seventh graders have set up a treasure hunt that they want the community to find.
Scattered around the city are hidden glass bottles filled with personal poems. The bottles could be stashed near a park or a garden, or even hidden within a store.
Middle school English language arts teachers Lindsey Lucas and Angie Kennedy bought 200 glass bottles for their students to place their poetry in and hide wherever they wanted.
The only hiding spot limitations were the school and the students’ homes. Half of the class hid their poems last Thursday, and the other half hid them Tuesday.
Kennedy came up with the idea to use as their final assignment for their poetry unit.
“She wanted to do it as a spread-the-word, spread happiness activity,” Lucas said.
They had been covering poetry for two months, and their bottled poetry ties into the novel they are reading, “And Then There Were None,” which incorporates a message in a bottle.
Originally, they wanted to use a QR code in the bottles. They instead centered it more around geocaching, which is popular around the grade level, Lucas said.
“Doing a community activity has always been my goal as an educator,” Lucas said.
Geocaching serves as a scavenger hunt that interacts with the public. It’s coined “the world’s largest treasure hunting community” by the official Geocaching Blog. Participants use a geocache app or GPS device to find objects hidden by other members.
Lucas and Kennedy are making their own version of geocaching.
“We can build maps in our classroom of where they end up finding their poems, who finds their poems, any fun messages that they leave,” Lucas said.
When found, the poem has a note requesting you email Lucas and send a picture. She is adding the pictures to her bulletin board in her classroom.
“The kids get really excited when their poems are found,” Lucas said. “I do think a lot of kids have responded positively.”
Some of them are re-hiding them in hopes of being found again.
Seventh grader Macie Thill has already had her poem found twice.
“I’ve enjoyed being able to share with the community and letting them see what we are doing in school,” Thill said.
Her poem was about the beach on a sunny day. She described the beach without saying what it was until the end of the poem.
The students could use any poem, but many used ones they worked on in class.
“I liked hiding it and letting people see my poem,” classmate Zeke Bartmess said.
His poem was about the honor of being in the Army. Bartmess and Thill both had poems that were about 12 lines. They hid them strategically, hoping people might stumble upon them.
Classmate Caroline Winton enjoyed the project and wrote her poem about happiness to go along with the positive theme.
“The message in the bottle part was cool,” she said.
Eight of the poems were found in a week. Lucas has loved the community reactions to the project, and hopes to continue implementing similar ideas.
Reach reporter Katie Hanney at [email protected].