People, Places, Things, and Animals

Last week’s reading lessons were focused on nouns and adjectives. The goal was to introduce students to nouns then teach how adjectives can be used in writing. Since the word and concept of an adjective is more complex than the kindergarteners are ready for. So, for this week, I wanted the students to learn the art of using describing words. 

Students made an “I am” poster as the introduction activity for learning about adjectives. Prior to this lesson, I took a picture of each student posing however they wanted. I printed these, cut them out, and glued them onto a piece of construction paper. For the activity, each student was asked to think of six adjectives that described them. These were written on the construction paper around their picture. “I am.. ” went at the top of the page. When reading the adjectives on their poster, students would say “I am smart” or whichever adjectives they chose. This helped the students understand that they were using adjectives to describe themselves. I allowed the students to use phonetic spellings as long as they did their best to stretch out each word.

On Wednesday, the class was divided into small groups. They worked together to sort pictures of objects into noun types(person, place, animal, thing). Originally, my plan was for the students to do this activity individually on their own iPad. But, technology had a different plan! Only five of the iPads decided to load the document. In the end, this worked out in my favor! The students were forced to figure out how to share the iPad, take turns sorting the pictures, and work as a team to sort each noun. 

Thursday’s activity and lesson tied together nouns, adjectives, and writing. I created an activity sheet that had a picture of a noun in the middle with five boxes surrounding it. In each box, the students needed to write a describing word/adjective for the picture. The nouns being described included a tiger, sun, airplane, and monster. 

During Daily 5 on Thursday, I worked with a small group of students on completing sentences by filing in nouns and adjectives. The students were encouraged to use any noun or adjective they could think of. Words did not have to spelled correctly as long as students did their best to stretch out each word. Several of the sentences turned out to be pretty creative!

It is interesting to see how some of the students "hear" letter sounds. This student wrote kite in the first box and hot in the second. I watched her stretch out each sound and this is how she interpreted the word to sound phonetically.  

The third sentence this student wrote was interesting: "My food is kold"

Reading for this week is all things Dr Seuss in honor of his birthday! I hope to have fun activities and lessons to blog about (so stay tuned :) !