Figurative Language

Last year our district came up with a whole new set of tests for our students (oh joy) called checkpoints (I guess the word "benchmarks" is no longer the buzzword.) It's sort of our district's way of being test-ready and gauging progress through out the year. We actually give 4 sets of checkpoints (Gasp...Yes, 4 more standardized-type testing...don't get me started.) One of the areas the 4th and 5th grade checkpoints really focused a lot on was figurative language.



I wanted to come up with an on-going figurative language practice that my kidlets could do--maybe during Daily 5--maybe as a bell ringer activity. Last year I made a new anchor chart everyday for this type of practice and my kidlets copied down all the info into a generic comp book. It's my hope that this will become second nature to my kidlets and they will naturally start incorporating figurative language into their writing. Last year we tried to learn a new idiom every day and by the end of the year the kids were so excited to find examples of figurative language in their own books. So here is my work-in-progress. It is in no way perfect yet. I may need to change it once I see how my kidlets progress. It's actually a 2-page document that needs to be copied back-to-back. It will go in a 3-ring notebook and my kidlets will be able to see both pages at once. Download here: Page 2 Page 1 (sorry...I don't know how to make them into one download yet.)

All About Me: Figurative Language "Foldable"

All year we worked on Figurative Language to the point where our class could hardly read a paragraph in a book without one of the students shouting out some sort of figurative language that they found. For a culminating activity, I purchased this really neat figurative language project off of "Teachers Pay Teachers" which was made by "Working For the Classroom". The kids had a great time making them even though they were time consuming. They were a big hit at Open House.


Here are some inside photos of the project: