resemble what it would look like if the student had folded the flap behind the page. I made the first page by listing all of the literary elements in their own boxes. I then copied and pasted that page, removed the first element, and replaced it with a white text box divided into two sections (definition/example). I repeated this process, copying and pasting the first slide, replacing the next element in turn, until all 18 terms had a slide. The final slide is where I put my answer key. Students click on each element and are jumped to the place where they can enter a definition and example for it. Each of the slides also have a "close element" button that will return them to the main slide, where they can select another element. To add the definitions and examples the slides must be in edit mode. After this, the slides can be used in present mode, or published to the web.
After we take notes, there are many other activities we do. The most popular of which is Literary Elements Memory Game. I print the literary elements terms on one color of card stock, and the definitions on a second color. For added durability, I laminate the pages before cutting the cards apart (cold lamination is great for this, it never peels). In groups of 2-4, students then mix up the terms and definitions, and lay them out face down on the table. Students take turns turning over one card of each color, and seeing if the term and definition match. If a match is made, the student takes the cards and repeats his/her actions. If a match is not made, the student turns both cards back over, and play proceeds to the next person. My students enjoy this game, and it gives them a lot of practice with the terms. Sometimes I add an extra layer to the game by saying each match is worth two points. If a match is not revealed, students can earn points by giving a definition for the term turned over, and/or giving the correct term for the definition showing. This way every turn has the potential of earning students two points. This activity does have a digital replacement as well. I chose to make a literary elements drag and drop sort. The 18 terms are on the left side of open books. In a lower corner of the slide there is a pile of the right side of the open books. On the right side are the definitions for the terms. Students drag a definition off the pile and drop it next to the corresponding term, forming a complete book. As with all Slides drag and drop activities, this one is not self-checking, but the answer key is on the last slide. Teaching vocabulary out of context is not my preferred method, but we don't always get an option in these things. I hope these ideas will give you some inspiration for your own classes. Happy teaching, everyone!
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in the text, or by clicking the picture above). I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, and am seriously considering doing away with the paper project completely. The digital version consists of a table of contents page that lists al 15 text features. Each text feature button is hyperlinked to a slide with three sections: definition, how it helps me, photo. Students complete each slide (using the image search built into Google Slides or by uploading their own photos) using the directions provided on slide two. Each of the text feature slides also includes a button that hyperlinks them back to the table of contents. Once students have completed the project, they can use it in edit mode, present mode, or even publish it to the web for easy access. The hyperlinked buttons make it easy for them to move between features, checking definitions, and seeing examples.
To further reinforce text feature vocabulary, we also do a sort. Students are given cards that contain one of three things: the text feature, a definition, an example. Students then sort the cards, matching the text feature to its definition and example. A digital version is also available. The difficult thing about the digital drag and drop version is that the pictures are a little small. Students increase the zoom on the screen to help them, which works well, but it's still not as convenient as I'd like. This is the first digital version of a paper activity that I've been a little disappointed in. The students really enjoy the paper sort, and the activity itself provides excellent practice with the vocabulary. It's one we usually do multiple times throughout the year, and students rarely complain about the repetition. They enjoy sorts, and this one is colorful and engaging. Hopefully this gives you a couple of new ideas for your next text features lesson. I'm teaching them again next semester, still in a remote format, so I'm going to continue thinking about how I can improve the digital sort. Happy teaching, everyone!
vocabulary to the definition, picture, answer, or anything else I chose to put on the other side. My question words match up card set has three different cards. The first card asks the students to match the wh– word with the type of answer it elicits and a picture. The second card asks students to match the wh– word with the correct question (there is a blank line instead of the wh– word). The third card asks students to match the wh– word with a short answer. Again, since we are virtual this semester (and it's looking more and more like next semester will be as well), I created a digital version of the match up cards. The digital version does not require the boards, but all of the matching items are the same. Rather than using rubber bands to indicate their matches, students stretch provided lines from one side to the other.
Once students have gotten relatively familiar with the question words and the answers they each produce, it's time for our first game. Beach Ball Questions is one of my students' favorite games to play, I think because they get to throw a ball around the classroom. All that is required to prep this game is a beach ball and a Sharpie marker. Blow up the ball and use the marker to write a question word in huge letters, one for each section of the ball. Allow the writing to dry, deflate, take to school, reinflate, and you are ready to play. Students gather in a circle and I start the game by tossing the ball in the air and catching it with two hands. Using whatever question word my right thumb is on, I ask a question before tossing the ball to another player. The person who catches the ball must first use a complete sentence to answer my question, then he/she asks a new question that begins with whatever word his/her right thumb is on. Play continues in this manner for as long or short as you like. I encourage students to not repeat questions, and sometimes I will help them think of one if they can't come up with something new. During our question word unit I keep the beach ball at school, and whenever we have an extra couple minutes at the end of class I'll grab it and we'll play for awhile. It's a great way to get out of our seats and practice our speaking and listening skills, as well as our question word vocabulary. The second practice game we like to play (which you can download for free using the links above or in this paragraph) is Escape! The Question Grid. The goal of this game is to move from one side of the grid to the other by asking and answering questions. Students choose one side of the grid (one student per side), and any question word on that side, from which to start. On a student's turn, he/she answers the question asked by the previous student, indicates which square he/she would like to claim (it must have at least one side touching a square which already belongs to the student), and asks a question using the word in the square. If the question is grammatically correct, the student uses his/her dry erase marker to color in the square on the laminated grid. The next player then takes his/her turn. Play continues until one student reaches the opposite side and escapes the grid. A digital version of Escape! The Question Grid is also available. In the digital version students must type their questions onto the provided rectangles, and then drag and drop the rectangle onto the square they are claiming. There is also a variant of the game that includes bridges. The bridges, limited to five per player, can be used to cross over a square previously claimed by an opponent. In order to deploy a bridge, a student must type a complete sentence answer to the question posed on the cover of the square he/she wishes to cross over. The use of the bridge constitutes the player's turn, but does open up more spaces for him/her to claim in the future. Though this game takes a bit more prep work than Beach Ball Questions, and can't be as easily used as a time filler at the end of a lesson, it is still a very fun practice game. I especially like it because we can play it over and over again since the questions and answers change every time. As I said in the beginning, these are only the resources, activities, and games I use in the initial stages of my question words unit. On Thursday I'll share some of the more advanced activities and games we use, including a couple more free ones. Happy teaching, everyone!
are on fry boxes, and the synonyms are on rectangles that I print on yellow cardstock to make the fries. The students must sort the fries onto the correct boxes, five fries per box, and be prepared to explain why they placed each fry where they did. Since some of the synonyms (such as dismal which can be sad or bad) could be matched with more than one word, it is the ability to defend their choices that takes this activity to the next level.
I am fully on line this semester, but I didn't want to forego this particular activity. My adult students especially appreciate it because so many of these synonyms are words they've never heard before. This prompted me to create a digital drag and drop version of French Fry Synonyms. Drag and drop activities are very easy to create, and my students have really enjoyed doing them. When creating a drag and drop activity, the first thing you need to do is decide what will be stationary and what won't. You want to create all of your stationary items, and then convert them into background images. Making all stationary items part of the background protects them from being accidentally moved, edited, or deleted. I prefer to do this in PowerPoint, in fact I do almost everything in PowerPoint. When I open PowerPoint, the first thing I do is adjust the size of the slide. You can do this by clicking on Design and Slide Size at the top. I vary my slide sizes for the different activities, but for this one I chose 17" x 11". PowerPoint will then ask if you want maximize or ensure fit of your slide elements. Since this is the first thing I do, it doesn't matter which I choose, but I always choose ensure fit, just so I'm in the habit if I ever change the size of a slide I've already designed. The second step in my drag and drop creation practice is to choose a background. You can find the Format Background option in the Design menu, or by right clicking on the slide and choosing Format Background from the menu that appears. I recommend that you choose something simple and not distracting. For this particular activity I chose a marbled look from my personal collection of pretextured backgrounds, hoping to create the illusion of a kitchen countertop. Often I will use the transparency slide in the Format Background menu to lighten the background. This helps my text and other elements to stand out a bit more. The final step is to click Apply to All at the bottom of the Format Background menu. Now the fun begins with the designing of the non-moving elements. For French Fry Synonyms I wanted a section with the fry boxes and a separate fry station (place for my fries that needed to be sorted). I also knew that I needed room above each fry box for students to place the synonym fries, so I decided to divide my sixteen overused words onto two slides. The fry station was easy to create, all I had to do was draw a straight line from top to bottom and add the text "Fry Station" at the top. To create the fry boxes, I searched Pixaby (great source for royalty-free, commercial use, no attribution required images) for fry boxes, and chose one that was simple. In order to remove the fries in the original drawing, I inserted the image into Photoshop, selected the inside of the fry box, reversed my selection, and hit delete. I was then able to fill the box with a red color, and save it as a .jpeg. Back in PowerPoint, I inserted the now empty red fry box, resized it, added a text box, and typed my first overused word. I was then able to copy and paste the box seven more times, move them around the slide, and change the word on each. To create my second slide, I opened the Insert menu, clicked New Slide, Duplicate Selected Slides. After changing the words one each fry box, I was finished. In order to covert my slides to images, I opened the File menu and clicked Save As. After choosing where I wanted the file saved, I changed the file type to .jpeg, clicked save, and chose All Slides. This created a new folder in my selected location, with a .jpeg file of each slide. The fries would ultimately be moveable elements of my activity, but I didn't want students to be able to edit (either by accident or on purpose) the synonym typed on each. In order to prevent this, I needed to create each fry as a separate image, one I'd be able to insert onto my final activity slides. Still in PowerPoint, I selected the Insert menu again, Shapes, and chose the rectangle shape tool. In my fry station (though it doesn't matter where you do this), I drew a rectangle, changed the color to yellow, double clicked inside it to add text, and typed my first synonym. After formatting the text and resizing to my liking, I copied and pasted the fry 39 times (eight fry boxes, five synonym fries per box, 40 fries total). I then went through and changed the synonym on each fry. To get my fries for the next slide, I selected all of the fries, copied them, and pasted them onto slide two. After changing the synonym on each again, I was done creating synonym fries. The final step was to save them as images by right clicking on each fry, choosing Save as Image, and giving it a name. I like to name my draggable elements by whatever word is on them so they are automatically alphabetized for me in my file. This helps later because when I insert the images onto the final slide they are inserted in alphabetical order, saving me the trouble of tying to figure out how to arrange them in "random" order. In this instance, since I have two different sets of draggable images, I added a 2 to the front of the second set so I could quickly tell each set apart. After all of this, it was finally time to create the final activity slides. I opened my Google Drive and created a new Slides file. Step one, as before, was to resize the slide by clicking File, Page Set Up, Custom. I then entered the same dimensions as before (17"x11"), and clicked Apply. It is very important to do this first so your background images (the unmovable parts of your activity) don't get distorted when you import them. When importing the unmovable background images, you can do it several ways. If you only have a couple of slides in the activity (such as with this activity), you can insert the background by right clicking on the slide, choosing Change Background, Choose Image, Browse, navigate to and select your image, Open, Done. You will need to repeat these steps for each slide. If you have a lot of slides (as I've had in other activities such as Too or Enough? or Context Clues Connect Four), I recommend using the Add-on Slides Toolbox. This Add-on allows you to import multiple images at a time, and set them as backgrounds on individual slides, with just a few clicks. It was a huge time saver for me! It is now time to insert the movable elements. To do this, click Insert, Image, Upload from Computer. You can then insert as many images as you like. If an image needs cropped (sometimes clear space will be added around the edges), simply triple click on it and use the black bars to move the edges in and out. Once all of the images have been cropped, select them all (ctrl+a), and create a single pile by clicking Arrange, Align, Center, Arrange, Align, Middle. Once all of the images are in a single pile, you can adjust the size by dragging the blue boxes. If you want to maintain your proportions, try holding down the shift key while you drag the corner boxes. You can also set the size manually by clicking Format, Format Options, and typing in the exact dimensions you would like. Once all of the pieces have been sized to your liking, arrange them in your holding area (fry station in this case). Your work will be automatically saved in your Google Drive. All that remains is to assign the activity to your students and let the fun begin! There are many ways to do this, and many of the specifics will depend on your LMS. When I did this activity with my adults last week, I copied and pasted the two activity slides enough times so each student would have his or her own set. I then put names on each slide so no one would be confused as to which slides were assigned to which student. Finally, I shared the deck with my students (giving them editing rights), and we all dived in. As the students worked on their individual slides, I moved from slide to slide, checking answers. If a fry was placed on the correct box, I drew a smiley face next to it. If a fry was not placed correctly, I either moved it back to the fry station (for obviously wrong answers, such as colossal for little), or asked the student for an explanation. Not all of my students have microphones that work well, so we like to use the built-in chat feature to communicate. If the student could give a defense of his/her choice that made sense, I added a smiley face; if not, the fry was returned to the fry station for resorting. They loved it, and as is typical for my adult students, they wanted to be sure they'd continue to have access to the activity so they could write all the words down for further study. There are many other ways to create and use drag and drop activities, but this is the method that works for me. My students really do enjoy them, and are very engaged while completing them. Besides in class activities, such as this one, I've also assigned them as homework, and provided some for extra practice. I hope you and your students will enjoy them as much as we do. Happy teaching, everyone!
the way they did. Once they have successfully ordered their words, and explained their reasoning, students then write the words (one per shade) on the paint chips, placing the weakest word in the lightest shade.
I like this project because it helps students understand that language can be very precise, as well as descriptive. The requirement to explain their reasoning behind the ordering of the words always leads to some interesting discussions, and more than once a student has put words into an order I initially disagreed with, but they made a convincing argument that won me over. I also like how they have to really dig into the synonyms, not just copy them from the thesaurus. You can't successfully rank words by strength, and defend your choices, without knowing what each individual word means, and how it differs in meaning from the other synonyms. Ultimately students end up considering the synonyms' definitions and example sentences, as well as other factors when making their choices. Ultimately this quick (the entire process takes one class period or less) activity produces a lot of learning!
My next step was to go through my curriculum and make a word wall card for every vocabulary word in every story. Each card had the word, a student-friendly definition, and a picture. You can download the pdf version of these cards for yourself using the buttons below. I will warn you though, I never actually taught all eight units of either book, so I never actually finished the final unit of level A, nor the last two of level B. I also realized too late that I would eventually need to sort these cards out again and it might be good to label the back of them with the level and unit number. Hopefully you can learn from my mistake and save yourself some time and work. Then came the fun part: the teaching. Before we'd read a selection in our books, my students and I would all gather around the word wall. We'd discuss the vocabulary for that selection one-by-one, talking about the word and its definition, discussing the part of speech, finding it in the text and reading the sentence, and then creating example sentences of our own. We'd then staple the word into the correct section of our word wall and move to the next. By the end of the year we had quite the collection of words, but now they were all words we had carefully considered and used, we'd actually learned the vocabulary. Besides the vocabulary from our readings, we also worked with academic vocabulary from two different sources. The first was the previously mentioned CCSS academic vocabulary units I did with all of my classes, and the ELA teachers at the schools used as well. The second was the academic vocabulary addressed by the Inside series. The text books themselves had virtually nothing addressing academic vocabulary, and what was in the workbook was weak and (in my opinion) boring. I ultimately made a list of the words practiced in each unit and created my own academic vocabulary instructional plan and activities. Besides the word wall cards, for each unit we also had a cart we completed (word, picture, definition, example sentence), sort cards, clip cards (center held the definition, the words were around the edges), match-it cards, worksheets, scrambled word sets, and an assessment. The entire package is available for both Inside level A and level B (click the pictures above), but can also be used with any curriculum as they don't depend on the Inside texts at all. It took time for the students to adjust, but the word wall became a valuable resource with students often perusing it to remember old words and discover new. Since we spent significant time discussing the words before adding them to the wall, the students felt a sense of ownership over it. When I tried to take some of the older words (from first semester) down to make room for new ones, they protested quite vehemently saying, "Don't mess up our wall!" I was ultimately forced to expand the word wall to a second (and sometimes third) bulletin board, but I didn't mind, my students were learning and using new vocabulary!
Each student received a different graphic organizer (a total of eight words were represented). After completing the graphic organizer they were able to use it as payment for a tombstone and ghosts. In groups (based on the word from their organizer) the students designed the tombstone listing the overused word as the name and the part of speech as the relationship. They then listed one synonym on each ghost (a minimum of three was required) and decorated those as well. Everything was eventually combined into one bulletin board under the title of "Word Cemetery Where Dead Words Rise As Synonyms." The students loved it and actually started using some of the synonyms on occasion! Administration thought it was great too and specifically commented on how clever it was after a walk through. This year our October celebrations are online so I wanted to develop a digital version of the activity. I decided to use one of my favorite programs: Google Slides. The basic concept is still the same and slide four (pictured above) has the eight tombstones, along with an example and a supply of ghosts already provided. The example and tombstones themselves are in the background, and thus protected for accidental (or not-so-accidental) editing. The graphic organizers appear on the following slides, one for each word, and are also in the background, with textboxes supplied for student notes. One of the things that most excited me about this project was it gave me a chance to create my first "infinity" draw piles. I'd seen other digital activity descriptions refer to them, but hadn't really thought about their creation. It turned out to be remarkably simple, one of those "Duh!" moments that I seem to be having so often these days. I simply chose my ghost (once again I was able to find the royalty free clipart I needed on Pixaby), added a text box, grouped the two together, and copied/pasted it about 20 times. I then selected all of the ghosts (easier for the first set since I could simply click ctrl+A), right clicked on them, chose align vertically-middle, align horizontally-center, and they had all moved into a single pile. I repeated the process with the second ghost (because I just had to have two different ghosts), and I had two "infinity" piles of ghosts students could drag and drop. Of course the piles aren't truly never ending, but since students were only required to do three synonyms per dead word (meaning a total of 24 synonyms), and there are about 40 ghosts in total, the chances of them running out are slim. If your students are over achievers, and you fear them running out, simply paste a few more ghosts onto the slide before aligning them into a single pile. You can get both of these activities for yourself by clicking on the pictures above. As I said, my students found the process to be a lot of fun and it was a great addition to our October festivities. Happy teaching everyone! Want more synonym fun? Check out my French Fry Synonyms Sorts!
To create the game I started, as I almost always do, in PowerPoint. As I've stated before, in order to prevent things from being accidentally (or accidentally-on-purpose) edited or deleted by students as they play, I put as much as possible into the background. Thus, I start creating my games in PowerPoint and design all of the elements that I don't want students to change or move on the slide. I then save my slides as images (File-Save As-choose .jpg or .png-all slides). In this case, the slide creation was quite simple. I needed a title slide, a game board slide with directions, question slides, and answer slides. My questions were sentences using the academic vocabulary words, the answer slides were definitions for the words. Since I didn't have time to create 150 new example sentences I decided to use the sentences I'd already written for my 30 weeks of academic vocabulary posters. Transferring the sentences was easy. I set up the text box on my first question slide (changed the font, size, and made it bold), opened my original file, copied the sentence, right clicked on my question slide in PowerPoint, and under paste chose the A symbol (text only). This pasted the text into my slide but kept the formatting I'd just set up. I added a rectangle shape that said "Answer," and my first question slide was finished. In order to keep everything the same, I then created a duplicate slide to be my answer slide. I changed the text in the rectangle shape to "Game Board," and changed the question text to be the definition (also copied from the original file) instead of an example sentence. For each subsequent word I created a duplicate of the question or answer slide preceding it and changed only the question or answer text. The one thing I had to be sure to do while creating the question and answer slides was keep my question slides together. In other words, I couldn't have my first question on slide three and the answer for that question on slide four. If slide three was question one, then slide four needed to be question two, and so on. This is for two reasons: 1. the game has to remain in edit mode when students play it and I don't want them to be able to see the answer in the slide sorter on the left, and 2. I knew I'd be using the "draw" a card function in the game play script my husband wrote me and it requires all of the question cards to be sequentially numbered. This meant I had to do some scrolling as I set up the slides, but it wasn't difficult. Once my slides were all designed and saved as images, it was time to insert them into Google Slides. The easiest way to do this is to use Slides Toolbox. The toolbox add-on has an insert tool that allows you to make slides from images and set the image as the background. After opening the toolbox and selecting the images I wanted it took about 2 minutes for everything to be uploaded and set up. Two minutes may seem like a long time, but it is much faster than trying to set over 150 slides' backgrounds individually! The next step was to set up hyperlinks to make my "Answer" and "Game Board" buttons functional. To do this I used the shape tool to draw a box over the "Answer" button on my first question slide. I then changed that box's border and color to transparent. Then I copied the box and pasted onto all of the following question slides. Then, noting the number of the first answer slide, I went back to my first question slide and hyperlinked the "Answer" button to the first answer slide. To do this I clicked on my transparent box, clicked the link button in the toolbar, chose slides in this presentation, and chose the slide number for the first answer. I then repeated these steps for each of the subsequent questions, simply adding one to the slide number I was linking to (question one linked to slide 79, question two linked to slide 80...). Making my "Game Board" button functional was much easier. I simply added a clear box to the top of my "Game Board" button on the first answer slide and linked it to slide three (my game board). I then copied this linked rectangle and pasted it onto each subsequent answer slide. I was now ready to install the game play script. This script adds a menu item to Google Slides that says "Game Play." The sub-menus are "Draw a Card" and "Roll the dice." This game does not require dice, so I had my husband take out that part of the script. Both written and video instructions for installing and using the script are included with the download. You can get your own copy of the script by using the button below. Finally, I needed markers for the game board. I first inserted an X shape (I use the one found under the equation section of the shapes too.). I then copied and pasted it 41 times, so I had 42 X's in total. To get it the size I wanted, I selected all of the shapes, clicked arrange, align, and center. This put all of my X's on top of one another and I was able to easily drag the corners to get them to be the correct size. I then changed the color and distributed them across the bottom of the screen. Finally, I selected half of the X's and changed the color again so each player would have his/her own set. This is the first digital game I've created that does not have a paper-version as well. While there were other activities that changed format or type when they were converted to digital, this one is the first that is completely new. In the future I hope to create a paper-based version, but for now the only option available is digital. You can get either Context Clues Connect Four game by clicking the pictures above, or a discounted bundle of both by using the button below. You can also get the paper-based 15 week academic vocabulary units by using the pictures above, or a bundle of all 30 weeks by using the button below. Also available is a bundle that combines both Connect Four games and all 30 weeks of academic vocabulary.
In order to facilitate their emotional vocabulary learning, I developed the game How Do You Feel? This simple cover up game is a fun introduction and practice activity for nine emotions. I explained cover up games in a previous blog post, but I'll give you a brief review. In short, the goal of the game is to cover up a certain number of spaces on your game board before your opponent can do the same. Sometimes I have students play this game tic-tac-toe style (cover three in a row). Sometimes I require the four corners. Other times I tell them they have to completely cover their board to win. Mostly it depends on how much time we have to play which version I choose.
To play How Do You Feel? the first player will either spin the emotions spinner (paper version) or use the specially scripted emotion generator (digital version). Either way, the student will be given a specific emotion to find on his/her game board. The student then locates the emoji representing the given emotion, and gives an example of a time he/she might feel that emotion (i.e.: I feel tired when I stay up late watching soccer.). If the sentence is correct, the student is able to cover that emoji (I use milk jug lids for the paper version and there are X's provided for the digital version). Player two then takes a turn. If, in subsequent turns, players spin or generate an emotion that is already covered, the turn is forfeited. The first player to cover the agreed upon amount of spaces is the winner. As mentioned above, I explained how to make digital cover up games in a previous blog post. This digital game does have a specially scripted menu item though for generating the emotions. Here's a video to show you what that menu looks like and how to play the game: One last thing before I go, the script from this game is not available for separate purchase, it's too specific, but other scripts for making your own digital games are available. Each of the scripts comes with a video showing you exactly how to install and use it. You can use the buttons below to get either version of this game, or any of the various scripts available, for yourself. Happy teaching everyone! |
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