Trashketball!

     State testing starts next week.  (I can only assume a rant & rave post about that will follow soon after).  In the meantime, here's a review game that I played with my students to help them with figurative language!
     The game is called Trashketball, and the Powerpoint & instructions can be found here.  To be honest, it's a review game that could be easily adapted to any standard or skill your kids are working on, but it was a perfect culmination to our frenzied figurative language unit.
     I gave each group of 4-6 students a marker and 10 sheets of paper.  While viewing Powerpoint slides, the students work in groups to answer questions about the type(s) of figurative language displayed.  They have about a minute to come up with the correct answer, then we go over it.  Any group with the correct answer gets to save their answer sheet.  Wrong answers go straight to the recycling bin (I'm nothing if not eco-friendly).  After all 10 questions have been answered, the teams get their correct answer sheets back.  Some groups had all 10, others had as few as 6 or 7.  Then they get a chance to shoot their correct answers into the recycling bin (see?  eco-friendly!).  We drew lines with tape on the floor too represent a 1-point line, a 2-point line, and a 3-point line.
     At first, the kids thought the lines were too close and it would be super easy.  They were totally wrong.  We had several shots bank off the whiteboard behind the "basket", and quite a few also bounce right off my (ceiling-mounted) projector.
     The team with the most points at the end won the game-and they couldn't stop talking about how much fun they'd had.  Apparently, I should try this strategy more often.

Library Journals

At our school, each class goes to the library once a week. For the departmentalized grades, the Language Arts teacher usually takes each of his/her classes. In my case, that means I take 3 classes of 6th graders to the library, and our day is Monday. To be honest, it makes for a nice way to ease in to the work week!

In the library my students are required to choose 3 books: a fiction, a non-fiction, and a book of their choice. All of these books should be (roughly) on their reading level. The kids show me their books before they can check them out with our librarian, so I can check the levels, genres, etc.

The students are responsible for reading their books throughout the week, both in class and at home. At the end of the week, they have to write about one of them. Each Friday, in their library journals, my students write me a letter telling me about their book. The letters need to follow the standard friendly-letter format, and consist of 5 sentences. The first sentence should tell me title/author, and often their opinion of the book. The rest of the letter can tell any number of things: what they liked/hated, favorite/least favorite part, new facts learned, predictions for the end of the book-honestly, whatever they want to share with me about the book.

I respond to each letter each week (yep, that's 48, if you're counting), and with most students, it creates a back & forth dialogue between the two of us. At the end of the school year, the kids will have a nice comprehensive "list" of the books they chose to read throughout the year.