I love teaching in October!  So many fun things to tie into the season!  We could never really teach Halloween, but I always worked in some good old fashioned monster fun.

Teresa at Confessions of a Teaching Junkie shared this adorable lesson on her blog last year. She shared her monster adjectives poster and I made my own version.

Not as cute as hers, but it will do!  Then I asked students to brainstorm words that describe the monsters and I wrote them all around the chart. Students then used the adjectives to write the close poem.
Teresa shared the poem as a freebie on her blog.
Another tie in to monsters was my Monster Measurement.  Students created a monster foot and then used a ruler to measure it to the nearest whole inch and related it to another real world object. They LOVED making these!
Click here for a copy of the  fill in the blank piece for students.
I do a whole HUGGEEEE Comm Core Unit with the text I Need My Monster  by Amanda Noll. I love this book so much.  I have started to write this unit for purchase on Teachers Pay Teachers but stall out every time since I lift the text for close reading and I can’t figure out how to do this legally with copyright and all that jazz. There is SO much you can do with this book!
Another great read aloud is  Go Away, Big Green Monster! by  Ed Emberly. I am sure this lesson is nothing new or earth shattering.  I use this text to show how readers visualize when they read and writers write to describe characters.
I hide the cover of the book Go
Away Big Green Monster
by Ed Emberly.  Explain that there are two
characters in this book, the narrator that is doing all of the talking and the
monster that we “see.”

Then I explain how Ed
used lots of describing words to paint a picture in the reader’s head. 
Words that describe a noun (a person, place or thing) are called
adjectives.  While reading the story today, we are going to picture what
the monster looks like using the adjectives and description Ed gives the
reader.
 Then I give each student a white sheet of
paper. I read aloud the story without showing the students ANY of the
pictures. Ask students to close their eyes and listen to the story and picture
in their heads what the monster looks like.  Then ask students to draw a
picture of the monster in pencil only while the story is read aloud.  You can read it aloud yourself  or students can listen to the recording on You Tube (as long as they cannot see the
images projected) .After students have imagined and drawn the picture in
pencil, read aloud the story one more time to add color and any details.
Then I read
aloud the book the last time, this time allowing students to see the pictures
and compare it to their pictures.  I ask, did Ed Emberly do a good job of describing his
characters?  Why or why not?  How can we do a better job or
describing our characters in our writing?
I wish I took pictures of their drawings last year.  They were so cute!

Click here for this great pack of FREE math centers, plus get tips and updates from me!

Tweet
Pin
Share
0 Shares