Right now I am focusing on teaching and reviewing author's craft with my class. We do this while reading stories and I always hope it builds a bridge for them as they begin to write their own stories. We review author's craft by learning all about figurative language, homophones and synonyms; anything that can add color and life to their writing and make their work stand out. This year I decided to add some fun Valentine's Day flair to our review with different center activities that allowed them to practice identifying and practicing both figurative language and homophones.
The first center was a figurative language review game. This was so easy to set up. I simply printed out some figurative language task cards and in teams of two, they read the card and tried to identify which figurative language tool was being used. Whomever answered correctly first won a token from the Valentine's Day Disk Drop Game. Once all of the tokens were earned, they each took turns dropping them down this plinko style game. Their squeals of excitement, paired with their engagement in answering the questions correctly made my teacher heart dance. This was easily the most popular center of the day, and it took me less than five minutes to prep!
The winner of the game got to choose one of these pun-y Valentine prizes. We previewed these prizes before the games began and talked about why the sayings on the labels were chosen. The students recognized the onomatopoeia on the Valentine Arrow Cards with Pencils right away.
We talked about play on words and how authors sometimes do that to make their writing more interesting or comical. They laughed at the Valentine Dough Exchange label as well as clever "You're a LLAMA fun" toys and Valentine Llama Exchange Cards. Since our classroom is cactus themed, the kids were head over heels for the Stuck on You Valentine's Day Cactus Pencils with Cards. This prize box of Valentine's Day goodies was a hit. We decided to add another review game to go along with some homophone practice. I created another easy to set up review center using the Homophone Dry Erase Card Set that I use in my morning intervention groups. I also utilized the Valentine Spinner Game.
For this game, the students solved the homophone cards and created their own version of the sentences. They were inspired by the use of homophones on many of the cards in the prize box. After they wrote their sentences, they got to spin the spinner and at the end of the game whoever had the most points got to choose from the prize box.
As a culminating activity, I had the students practice writing and using different figurative language and homophones by creating a Valentine's Day inspired story using the Valentine Conversation Self-Adhesive Foam Heart Stickers. They had to use figurative language in their story and I asked them to choose colorful words. We talked about how part of refining your author's craft is by using exciting language. The Other Ways to Say...Card Set Grades 2 - 3 gave many synonym option to the students, and helped out my more hesitant writers. I asked them to color code their figurative language so that it would pop in their final drafts. As an added bonus, this made grading super easy. Seeing the students hone in on their author's craft while having fun practicing and producing colorful writing was such a reward for me as their teacher.
