A Technology Inspired Adjective Lesson

This lesson sort of transpired organically. I had been introduced to wordle over the summer, and was interested in using it in the classroom.

Wordle is an easy to use website that takes text and transforms the words into a colourful word cloud. 

First we talked about what an adjective was. Kudos to the grade 2 team as hands around the computer lab shot up to inform me that adjectives were colours and words like big, small, fat etc.,

So we defined adjectives as descriptive words that describe nouns. We brainstormed all of the different ways we could describe a noun. Then we talked about Terry Fox, as we were raising money for the upcoming walk and were learning a lot about Terry's accomplishments. We came up with all the adjectives we could think of to describe Terry (brave, strong, courageous, caring, thoughtful). We learned that if we wanted a word to be bigger in the cloud, we needed to write it more often. 

I told students I wanted them to envision themselves and come up with all of the adjectives they could think of to describe themselves. They wrote their names often so it would show up bigger. 

The Heroes Among Us...

We had our Terry Fox kick off assembly and thought we'd continue the learning in our classroom. I adapted many of my lessons from The Terry Fox Foundation website.

First we looked at some pictures of heroes and superheroes. I used the document camera to show pictures of doctors, fire fighters, paramedics, moms, dads, as well as a variety of superheroes.  Then we discussed which were real life heroes and which were superheroes. We made a t-chart list to show all the characteristics of real life heroes vs superheroes. There were some distinct similarities and differences. 

We decided that Terry Fox was also a hero because of the character traits he exhibits. We discovered that there are other heroes in our lives who are brave, hard-working, selfless, kind, determined, take risks etc. Students chose someone in their lives who had similar character traits to a real life hero. Then they made a rough copy of what they wanted to write. 

The phrasing we used was: 

My hero is________________. He/she is my hero because...

We did have to review poster making (font, heading, message etc.) and wrote a rough draft before publishing our good copies. This will be a nice read for parents at Open House next week!