SAVY 2019: Session 5, Day 3 – Witty Wordplay (Rising 1st/2nd)

Posted by hallep on Wednesday, July 17, 2019 in Grade 1, Grade 2, SAVY.

As the writer’s techniques keep inspiring us, the more the writing flows! We started with another Word Ladder today and a creativity activity to spark flexible brainstorming called: Unusual uses for…  In this activity we take an everyday item and brainstorm other usual uses for it. On Monday our item was a spoon, Tuesday was a banana slicer and today it was a fork. This activity helps get creativity happening above and beyond. The result is that we transfer this skill to our writing so we are less likely to have the dreaded Writer’s Block.

After our warm-ups, we read a book called Dooby, Dooby Moo. I introduced the writer’s technique called Onomatopoeia and everyone thought it was a wacky word! After reading the book, we recalled funny sounds we heard in the book. We began a circle/doughnut map where we listed sounds we heard such as oink, whacka-whacka-quaaack, and fa la la la baaa. We looked closely and tried to identify which sounds were Onomatopoeia and which were not. We walked down the hallway making sounds and they quickly went to sounds such as stomp, pew-pew, bam, drip-drop, pow, etc. We then decided that the system rule of Onomatopoeia was that the words or sounds had to sound like something real, like a baby crying: waaa, waaa. We then set down to write our own Onomatopoeia. These poems were hilarious and everyone enjoyed sharing what they wrote to the class. One student exclaimed: “Onomatopoeia is my favorite writer’s technique so far!”

Next, we added to our systems model diagram, continuing to use a cafeteria as an example, and we were able to identify inputs and outputs as well as boundaries. After we can identify the components of a system, we will begin looking at how our language is a system with lots of sub-systems.

Then we learned about the writer’s technique, Simile. To help us understand the system boundaries of Similes, we read from two books, My Best Friend is as Sharp as a Pencil, and Skin Like Milk. From there, we went right to creating our own similes. We were able to see the connections between the words we chose to use to compare two things, and what message we were trying to get across.

This was another great day of writing!

Ms. Tyson