It’s been a little while since I shared a lesson idea on here and was this was the main reason why I began my blog and, having been inspired by Oliver Quinlan’s recent post mentioning about sharing more practice, here a little idea.
I used this idea on a recent day supply teaching where the teacher had left me a specific focus (extending descriptive vocabulary) for a Year 3 class but no learning activities. I began by playing them a clip from ‘Monsters University’ which included lots of different monsters to engage the children and also get them thinking about how different monsters can look.
After that, we froze the clip on one monster and had a class discussion about how we could describe the monster using wow words! Soon after we were getting words like ‘monstrous’, ‘spooky’, ‘slimy’, ‘intimidating’ and ‘ghoulish’.
The children were then given 5 mins to design their own monster. I was cautious about giving them such a short amount of time to do this but didn’t want it to become an art lesson. This amount of time was sufficient fortunately. Once designed their task was to write about their monster, using as many descriptive words as possible. The class I was in didn’t have thesauruses to hand but if I were to do this again I would get the children using them to expand their vocabulary even further.
As I went through the work at the end of the day, the result was excellent. Not only had children of all abilities focused and managed to get ideas down, but it was clear they had enjoyed the activity. They had the opportunity to self-assess at the end and a number of children had actually written how they had enjoyed the activity as well.
One for the future I think!
photo credit: HikingArtist.com via photopin cc
photo credit: chavezonico via photopin cc
Roberts Reflections 