Figurative Language Fun, Part 1.

Even though it's taken a few days to get to the computer, my classes have been buzzing the last couple of weeks; hitting concepts and preparing for those wonderful state assessments. {Insert happy dance, that aside from six students who were sick, my portion of the ELA assessments are O.V.E.R! Computer program snafus and all.} My thoughts and well wishes are with all of you in the midst or still preparing for your assessments!

One concept we hit hard was figurative language. We talk about the various forms of figurative language throughout the year. Our mentor sentences give a great refresher to many forms of figurative language. However, as vague as the tested material would be, I wanted to be sure that my students had a firm handle on things, regardless of whether or not figurative language would be seen on "the test".

We dove in.

I love having centers. I don't do them nearly as often as I would like to, but we I can get things rounded up the kiddos and I both enjoy the change of pace. Over two days student's traveled through four different stations, each covering a "trickier" form of figurative language. We talk about similes, metaphors, and personification throughout the year so much, that I opted not to have centers on these (students showed their knowledge on a pretest), although another day certainly could have been added. Without further adieu our center rotation. Each day, we had a picture book on the topic of one of the figurative language or full class work in addition to our rotations.

Onomatopoeia
For this station, students were to create a 3 box comic on Strip Design. The catch being, that each frame needed to have onomatopoeia words utilized. This app has some really neat 'stickers' that the student's used to really create a comic book feeling with those super sound words.

Hyperbole
One of my blogging buddies, Joanne, had this awesome activity in her store. My kiddos go so into it! For one particular student, I pulled him aside to explain this game a little differently. He knows how to stretch the truth on things, however he was struggling just a bit. I've also heard him during cross duty tell a "yo, mama jokes." I told him, I didn't want to hear those jokes in school, but to think of his hyperbole stems like that. The emphasis he put on the SO for the cards and his retorts cracked me up. (And they were all appropriate!)

Alliteration
Probably, my student's favorite station; I enjoyed their creations too. For this center, students used Pic Collage. On the app they had to write an alliteration, most chose to start it with their name. After writing it, they chose pictures to illustrate.

Idioms
This was one of the harder stations. Idioms are just hard, especially for some of my strugglers. I found this freebie sheet from Creative Classroom Lessons.  We read the book Things My Momma Likes to Say and discussed the literal and figurative meanings of words. There was also a list of common idioms to choose from. Having an adult at this station to discuss with students helped greatly.


There is one part of our figurative language fun. Hopefully within the next day or two I'll remember to take pictures of some of our other activities.