This activity is appropriate for: 1st - 5th grade / 6 - 10 years This creative activity gets kids thinking and writing descriptively! Choose a relatively simple sentence to write on the board and have students copy the sentence onto their own sheets of paper. Then challenge students to add adjectives to the sentence to make it more descriptive. (For example, “The girl walked along the street” might become “The careless girl walked along the busy street” or “The little girl walked along the long, quiet street.”) Call on volunteers to share their revised sentences aloud, or have them draw pictures to go with their sentences. Then compare them to see what a difference a few descriptive words can make! Here are a few sentences to get you started: My dog has fleas. My brother ate his vegetables. Look at that painting! That goat ate all the corn in the field. The car raced down the road. The zookeeper fed the animals in the zoo. She sang a song and danced in the rain. My dad works in a building. The boy pulled out his wand and cast a spell. Variation: For older students, encourage them to continue building a story around the sentence to create a whole paragraph. Invite them to compare their stories to illustrate how some editing and a few revisions can enhance the context and meaning of what we write.
This activity is appropriate for: preschool - 1st grade / 3 - 6 years This fun family tie-in helps students take what they know—and graph it! Conduct a quick student survey on any of the following topics, tally the responses, and then make a class graph to show the results: Siblings – Encourage students to share how many brothers or sisters they have. Label the columns of your graph with the following: “Only child,” “1 sibling,” “2 siblings,” “3 siblings” and “4 or more siblings,” and then tally and graph the results. Pets – Invite students to share what kind of pets they have at home. Label the columns of your graph with the following: “No pets,” “Dog,” “Cat,” “Bird” and “Other,” and then tally and graph the results. At-Home Head Count – Ask students to share how many people live in their home. Label the columns of your graph with the following: “2–3 people,” “4–5 people,” “6-7 people” and “More than 7 people,” and then tally and graph the results.
