Celebrate springtime with a fun language arts lesson on figurative language. Figurative language can make stories come alive! Showing your students how they can compare two things to create vivid, colorful stories is a great way to inspire young writers. This interactive crafting activity will brighten up your classroom while reinforcing those language arts skills. To get started, just grab a no-prep felt flower craft kit for each of your students.
The felt flower craft kits are simple to assemble and require no prep work from the teacher. This is a teacher's favorite kind of craftivity! First take the pipe cleaner and slide it through the felt flower. To secure the pipe cleaner, simply choose a flower center, peel off and stick into place. Smaller center pieces can then be added for depth and color. The flowers can be assembled in a multitude of different ways. I let my students look at the directions and then decide how they wanted to assemble them. This led to some fun color combinations!
Once all the flowers were assembled, I asked my students to look at their flower bouquet and come up with some words to describe their flowers. We made a list of these descriptive words on the board. I introduced figurative language like similes and metaphors and as a class my students thought of a few examples that used "like" or "as" to compare two different things.
Students used the FREE printable Simile Worksheet to record their similes. I had them use colored pencils to write the color word they chose to use. Some of their examples were. "My flower is as orange as a summer sunset," or " My flower is as blue as a mountain lake." These examples helped show my students just how colorful their writing could become when they use similes!
For a fun classroom display I took a wood planter box and painted it aqua with some tropical acrylic paint. Next, I took two shades of green construction paper and stacked them on top of each other. I trimmed the edges to replicate grass. I layered the two colors of green together and stapled them. The pieces of paper slid easily into the planter. I used small plastic cups and stapled the flowers to the edge of the cup. I layered them by stacking 2 to 3 cups inside each other so several flowers could be visible. Just arrange them to be spread evenly throughout the wood planter box.
For an additional activity I had my students use their watercolors to paint an insect. Using a hole punch, I punched a hole at the top and bottom and added a chenille stem through the insect. I then twisted the chenille stem around the edge of a ruler and slid it into the wooden planter box. We added these into the center of our spring simile flower box. My students took turns creating similes about the insects they'd created and wrote them on the back of their creations.
This makes a fun display that will brighten your classroom for spring!
