Popcorn adjectives

Such a fun (and yummy) lesson...

I went to Five Below and purchased enough of these so each student has one:


I assembled these and stapled them to my bulletin board (with film strip border).

I made sheets that have four popcorn pieces on them.  I made a sheet for each student and passed it out with a plate.

On each plate I dumped a dixie cup of each of the following flavors of popcorn:
buttery
cheese
white cheddar
hot cheese (only if they asked for this-everyone did)

Inside each piece of popcorn the students wrote an adjective to describe the popcorn.  They cut them out and placed them on the bulletin board to look like the pieces were popping out.

The best part?  I'm eating the leftover popcorn as I type this!  Yum-O!

Adjectives

I really wish I knew of Pinterest long ago... how old is it anyway?
There are some GREAT ideas there and if you aren't on there yet, you need to be (like NOW).

Here are some excellent ideas I have gotten from pinterest on teaching adjectives:













 (I thought you could do this with any legs-sports player, elf, monster, bear, etc)

Intervention

In the past I've had students who are ESL or LD.  Grammar can be very difficult for these children.  I have used this workbook with them and really like how it explains things at their level.

When possible use as many hands on activities that you can and really set goals for what these students must learn.  For me, being able to communicate (both written and spoken) is more important than picking out nous, verbs, etc.

Command or exclamation?

To help decide if a sentence needs a period or exclamation, I first explain what a command is and give examples.  Then I explain that an exclamation is a statement said with excitment or storng feeling.  I give examples of that.

Then I tell them the exciting part...  Hidden in the room are notecards.  On each notecards a sentence is written.  When they find it, they have to read it and decide is it a command or an exclamation?  They each have a piece of paper, divided into two parts.  One side is for commands the other for exclamations.

When they are done, we check it together.

Easy and fun!

Statement or question?

Knowing if a sentence is a statement or question seems really easy.  But when the endmark is missing, many young children do not know what type of sentence it is. 
To help with this we first discuss how most questions start (who, what, when, where, why, how, etc). These are our clue words to tell us the sentence is a question.  After we write these clue words onto a large piece of paper (which will stay up the entire year) the children are partnered up.  They write five questions on their paper that they'd like to know about their partner.  This is their question writing practice.  They take turns asking their questions and writing the answers (statement writing practice). 

When everyone is done the students can each share one question and answer that they found interesting about their partner.  They hand their work in to be checked, but not graded (since it's practice).