Happy Hump Day! :o) Today, we are sharing about one of my favorite things to teach: figurative language! How do you teach figurative language in Writer’s Workshop?
We are working on adding idioms to our writing this week. We are FINALLY almost done with our Snow Globe Stories (between snow days and getting through the entire writing process, it has taken us forever…) and we are typing them up now. But, I always tell my students, their stories are NEVER done. There are always things we can add to it to make it better, even if it’s just ONE sentence! So that was my goal today… I wanted them to add one idiom to their story if they could. Before we went to the computer lab for typing today, I read the book Even More Parts.
It is jam-packed full of idioms! And it is so cute! We talked about what each idiom meant in the book- I let the students share if they had heard it before. A couple of the idioms, they had no idea about the meaning… like, “I went to pieces.” Which I suppose at their age, they shouldn’t know that it means losing all control because of emotions. Ha!!
Because many of my students have a character in their story feeling scared or nervous (because they are trapped in a snow globe), I chose idioms to teach them that would go with those feelings. I challenged them to find what these idioms had in common. The students took notes about the meaning of each idiom on a flipbook as we went over the posters:
Most of them were successfully able to add an idiom into their story when we went to the computer lab. Some of them already had one in their story! I can’t always say this, but I am soooo excited to read this set of stories from my kiddos. (And you know that feeling… sometimes we just totally dread grading writing pieces!!)
The flipbook and the posters are in one of my newest products. Every year, I say I’m going to teach an idiom a week, and every year, my schedule gets overwhelmed and/or I forget. This is what prompted me to create my 30 Idioms Pack.
As you know if you’ve been a follower of mine for a while, I create all of my TPT products to use in my own classroom- I never make anything that is not for myself, too. I will use everything in this pack this year, but maybe not the same way as next year since this year is already over halfway through (EEK!!). I am going to show you later this week how I’m using one of the matching games in the unit- it is not the traditional way! It’s a great way to use matching games if the students don’t know the information on all the cards. How’s THAT for a teaser??? 😉
document.write(”);
