One Teacher's Adventures

Last week, my Grade 8 Science kids completed a lab to observe the characteristics of living things.  In it, they compared dry yeast and salt, then put each into apple juice to observe the reactions.  The first step in the lab was to describe the dry yeast and salt in a table, looking at the colour, size, texture, and shape of each. When I looked over the lab reports my kids had turned in, I was more than a little disappointed with their observations.  I had more than half of the class simply writing the word "small" for size of the grains, and I even had about 5 or 6 kids write "salty" for the texture of the salt!  This made me realize that I hadn't given them enough clarification on what was acceptable, scientific language for observations.  To help them understand the level of description I wanted, we completed a simple activity.  We went outside, and I asked each student to find a leaf.  We have a beautiful maple tree that takes up a large ...

This week, my class has been working on descriptive writing, similes, and metaphors.  Thursday night was out Meet the Teacher night, and I wanted the kids to create something visual to put up and impress the parents, and that's when I thought about Paint Chip Poetry!  I went to the local Wal-Mart and cleared them out of paint chips, and had my grade 4's choose a colour.  They then had to come up with 6 lines of poetry to describe their colour.  I asked them to consider the 5 senses and use rich adjectives and imagery so that their parents could see, hear, smell, feel, and taste their colours. We wrote some sample lines together as a class first, and then I let them go.  I was so impressed with the images they created, and they were a huge hit with the parents! Here are a few of the Paint Chip Poems that my grade 4's created.