Last year when my daughter was first learning her 3 times table we made this very simple 3 times table flower. She loved the idea and she has since made a number of them. So it was not a big surpr…
Have your lessons have lost their spark? Are you searching for some creative inspiration? This #2ndaryELA Twitter chat was all about out of the box teaching ideas in the ELA classroom. Middle school and high school English Language Arts teachers discussed interesting fiction and nonfiction pairings. Teachers also shared creative activity and projects that are both fun and rigorous. Read through the chat for ideas to implement in your own classroom.
Games, songs, stories and more online activities for young learners.
By The Daring English Teacher When teaching a novel, I love to mix things up and throw in a fun, creative, or collaborative activity that engages students as they analyze and interpret the novel’s theme, characters, symbols, or conflict. This allows me to enhance my students’ understanding of the novel, and it gives them a break from the day-to-day routine of reading and reviewing that often accompanies novel studies. Providing students with fun and engaging, yet still rigorous, activities enhances their understanding and fosters a love of reading. Here are three fun activities that you can easily incorporate into any novel study. This is one of my favorite, go-to collaborative activities. Collaborative posters are a great way to review key concepts, analyze symbols and motifs, and brainstorm for essays, and they require little planning. Before class starts, write one character, symbol, setting, motif, or element from the novel in pencil in the corner of each paper. When class begins, have students form groups of 2-4 students, and provide each group with one of the pieces of paper. Then, instruct your students to record the item, information, and quotes from the book on the poster. For this assignment, you can focus on the author’s use of symbols within the novel. You will select a variety of symbols in the novel and assign the symbols to different groups. It is okay if multiple groups are assigned the same symbol. Instruct each group to title their poster with the symbol, write as many details about the symbol as they can think about (this includes what it stands for), and record up to two different quotes illustrating how the author uses the symbol in the novel. I recently did this activity with my Romeo and Juliet unit, and it was a hit. The students were prepared for their essays, and they developed a deeper understanding for the play. Once students are done with the posters, display them throughout the classroom and have the students complete a gallery walk recording the information. This activity is great because it requires students to analyze their assigned topic, while at the same time reinforcing the importance of collaborative work. Even better, this activity gets students up and moving! As an alternative to making posters, this assignment also works very well with post-it notes. Simply provide your student groups with multiple post-it notes, and have the groups write information on the post-its. Then, have students post the notes on the board for the gallery walk. This option is especially beneficial when you want to have a gallery walk, but do not have the time for making posters in the classroom. You can also read about collaborative brainstorming ideas in this blog post. A fun and creative character analysis project you can complete in your classroom is a mock job fair in your classroom. To prepare for this activity, students either select or are assigned a character from the novel. They assume the role of this character and create a resume for this character listing strengths, accomplishments, and skills. To prepare for this activity, I usually teach students about resume writing, provide them with a list of power verbs, and give them a resume template. After students create their resumes, I host a mock job fair in my classroom for one day. During the mock job fair students are assigned to one of two groups, and the groups rotate between interviewer and interviewee. The students assigned to the interview role are given a set of interview questions to ask their candidate. As the candidate responds, the interviewer records the responses. After the interview is over, the students switch roles. This is one of my favorite activities for my Of Mice and Men unit because the students get to explore the characters on a deeper level. Once the activity is over, students write a brief argument piece about whether they would hire that character for the job. After I read an essential chapter with my students, I like to take a day or two to reflect on the reading, analyze what happened, and make sure that my students understand the importance of what they just read, and a creative comic strip assignment is ideal for this. One of the best times to assign this activity is right after a major conflict or at the peak of the story so that students can really analyze the novel's conflict. I like doing this activity with my students when we read Fahrenheit 451 because it helps them understand the conflict more. When assigning a comic strip assignment, make sure students focus on more than just drawing pictures by requiring them to include quotes from the novel as their dialogue. In addition to quotes, students should also write narration, cite their quotes in MLA format, and dedicate an entire box to the novel’s conflict. You can download this FREE, EXCLUSIVE resource to use in your classroom with your next novel study! For more fun, yet rigorous, activities that you can use with any novel study, check out my Novel Unit. This resource is 99 pages and is filled so many activities that you can use them throughout the year for multiple novel studies. From introductory activities to use before reading, to differentiated writing prompts with built-in scaffolding to use as you read, to post-reading cumulative assignments, and everything in between, this novel unit is my go-to resource when I'm in a pinch and need an activity. Click HERE to check out this resource. Here are some additional resources to help you teach the novel! The SuperHERO Teacher - Workbook for Any Novel Unit Study Grades 7-12 Addie Williams - Novel Study Package - Use with ANY NOVEL Presto Plans - Assignments for Any Novel or Short Story Secondary Sara - Chapter Study Guides: Student-Made Activity for ANY Novel
Find hands-on butterfly life cycle activities, butterfly science labs, and free printables to incorporate reading skills and get kids writing about science!
Hoy vamos a hacer manualidades con algo que tenemos a la mano, pues vamos hacer manualidades con granos de maíz y otros elementos vegetales como semillas de
Gorgeous culinary art by Ruth & Sira, illustrators and graphic designers from the north of Spain.
For more worksheets like this go to: http://superteacherworksheets.com/valentines.html
This Earth Day Hand Print Craft is a creative craft for your kids to create to celebrate the up-coming holiday!
Today we have the cutest school DIY & crafts that are classroom themed. These fun school crafts are great for back to school, end of school or just
Have I mentioned how creative my kiddos are!? I could shout it from the rooftop! They never seize to amaze me with their ideas and passion for learning. They remind me why I love my job so much. I love watching them learn. In writing, we have been working on our writers crafts. We have been trying to enhance our own writing by adding figurative language to engage our audience. Today, we focused on onomatopoeias. I introduced the lesson by reviewing what we already knew about the craft. In fifth and sixth grade, a lot of the things we are focusing on in writing is review. Most of my students have a pretty good handle on the idea. We talked about where we see onomatopoeias most often. They responded by saying things like, "children's books", "captions", and "comics". We centered our focus on the latter. Some many of my students are so interested in comic books. I decided this was a wonderful way to incorporate this! I gave the students each a blank comic consisting of a variety of frames. They were in charge of creating a comic using onomatopoeias! One onomatopoeias had to be present in each frame. They turned out wonderfully! I gave them mine as an example: The students' had so much fun reading their peers comics in the hallway. I loved hearing them standing outside my door reading the onomatopoeias with such emotion! "BANG! BOOM! CRASH!" The hallway has been filled with figurative language excitement.
