I've shared in the past about my descriptive writing with Mr. Potato Head, but for those who don't remember I'll review. I usually do a descriptive writing project at the end of my parts of the body unit with beginning level students where they build Mr. Potato Head, write a description, take him apart, trade descriptions and then try to replicate their friends' Mr. Potato Heads from the written descriptions only. This time I thought, why can't I do the same thing for my advanced students? After all aren't similes and metaphors about describing things? The state standards say the students have to write with figurative language and that is a writing project. The more the idea rolled around in my head the more I liked it. I decided to go with it, but my brain wasn't done thinking.
We, like every other school, are trying to conserve paper and my class is coming very close to being paperless so I was considering how I could do this digitally. The idea of a matching game was formed, which is when my brain went one step further and thought: I should get the principals involved! So I sent off an e-mail and they agreed to try their hand at the matching game and I was ready to roll. I typed up a GoogleDoc with the directions, put everything in Google Classroom and dug my Mr. Potato Heads out of the basement. At first the kids were a little dubious about anything involving a "little kids' toy", but once they got started they had a lot of fun trading pieces and making their Mr. Potato Heads look "just right". I then took the resulting paragraphs and photos and created a matching game in Google Drawings in which the students would drag the pictures onto the correct descriptions. A copy of the matching game was sent off to the principals and everyone had fun matching the pictures (though one student is still a bit bitter he didn't get the full extra credit because the principal got his wrong).
All in all it turned into a very successful assignment (thankfully since I involved the principals in an untested lesson plan!) and I think the kids did quite well. Not all of their similes and metaphors were grammatically perfect, but when you consider most of these students have been in the USA for less than two years (two for less than two months) and they are just in middle school, there's some pretty impressive stuff there in my opinion (and I'm not biased, even if I am their teacher). Now onto idioms, I think we're going to make a quilt. I read something somewhere about an idiom quilt.....