Fish Bowling

Is writing a friend or foe in your classroom? Here we're suppose to "write across the curriculum", but I mean in actual writing classes. Do you use a writer's workshop format? Student teaching and subbing I have loved fish bowling. It gets hard to read 20-30+ rough papers 3-5+ times. If you have never done fish bowling, when your students have completed their rough draft, you place them in groups of 4-6. The first time you do it with your class, you should should guide each group through it. Once they understand it you can place the groups together (different or same groups) and only work with 1-2 and let your stronger students run the group themselves.

Once the group is formed, everyone will take turns reading aloud their writings. You can choose to have your students read their own writing or to have them swap papers and read a classmate's paper. When they swap and have to read it aloud the classmate reading it tends to catch spelling and grammatical errors. It's completely up to you though. After each paper has been read, students go around the circle and comment on something they liked about the paper. Then they go back around the circle and comment on something they think could be improved. We call these our "stars" and our "wishes".

I really love this format because each student gets a lot of feedback from their peers and it really doesn't take a long time to do it.

So tell us, is writing a friend or foe? Have you ever fish bowled? Or what do you do?

~Steph

Figurative Language

Time for Friend of Foe Friday! This weeks topic is figurative language. Is this your friend or foe when it comes to teaching it in a classroom full of students? The 5^th grade class that I student taught in last year found it confusing and frustrating. My supervising teacher and I decided to make a figurative language unit that would teach figurative language and poetry but also be fun for the students. We decided to cover different kinds of poetry for two weeks. We chose types of poetry that the students could enjoy and were easy to follow. We would discuss the type of poem and the figurative language that was associated with that type of poetry for a few days. Then the students would write their own poem like the one we talked about. At the end of the two weeks the students would have several types of poems that they had written. Students that worked hard on their poems would be able to participate in a “Poetry Café”. This would be a time for each student to share their poems to the class. We even made a stage and plugged up a microphone. The students really enjoyed sharing their poems as well as hearing the other student’s poems. I found that students understood poetry and figurative language more by writing their own and also by hearing how their classmates used the figurative language in their poems.  

Our focuses during this unit were:

Onomatopoeia – Onomatopoeia Poems

Rhyme Scheme – “My Favorite Things” Poems

Imagery – “Color of Love” Poems

For more information on these activities please view my resources at our TpT store.

           

During this week we also discussed metaphors, similes, refrains, and stanzas. Even though we did not have a poem that focused on these figurative language elements this unit is a great place to discuss these other elements of figurative language. We also used a PowerPoint as the beginning of the unit. We used movie clips, commercials, and song lyrics that the students were familiar with that included different figurative language elements that we would be discussing. A PowerPoint with examples is a great way to introduce these elements to your students. What have you used to introduce these elements? Have you ever done an activity similar to the “Poetry café”? Let us know if figurative language has been your friend or foe?

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~Manda