This week the theme of the stories in our reading book is using clues to solve mysteries. I am tying my creative writing to this idea by teaching a mini unit on writing riddles. A big part of writing a good riddle is using descriptive language without stating the exact name of an object, hence the tie-in to adjectives. A great book to read while teaching adjectives is
Many Luscious Lollipops by Ruth Heller. The end of the book is advanced for second grade, but they understand that adjectives describe nouns and verbs and can tell how many.
After reading the book we created a list of as many adjectives as we could think of. Each student then renamed the book with a new title. My favorite was "One Beautiful Winged Horse".
The next day, we reviewed what we learned about adjectives and turned it in to the "secret snack game". I wrote several riddles about snacks and students had to circle all of the adjectives they could find. They then had to guess what type of snack I was describing. Small groups were then given a bag with a secret snack in it. They had to hide their snack from the rest of the class and come up with a list of as many adjectives as they could to describe that snack.
Tomorrow, the small groups will use their adjective lists to write at least 3 sentences describing their secret snack. The goal is to write as many adjectives as they can in the 3 sentences. The fourth and concluding sentence is, "What is my snack?" The rest of the class will guess what is in each mystery snack bag. Of course, this lesson would not be complete without eating the snacks!
This week the theme of the stories in our reading book is using clues to solve mysteries. I am tying my creative writing to this idea by teaching a mini unit on writing riddles. A big part of writing a good riddle is using descriptive language without stating the exact name of an object, hence the tie-in to adjectives. A great book to read while teaching adjectives is Many Luscious Lollipops by Ruth Heller. The end of the book is advanced for second grade, but they understand that adjectives describe nouns and verbs and can tell how many.
The next day, we reviewed what we learned about adjectives and turned it in to the "secret snack game". I wrote several riddles about snacks and students had to circle all of the adjectives they could find. They then had to guess what type of snack I was describing. Small groups were then given a bag with a secret snack in it. They had to hide their snack from the rest of the class and come up with a list of as many adjectives as they could to describe that snack. 
Tomorrow, the small groups will use their adjective lists to write at least 3 sentences describing their secret snack. The goal is to write as many adjectives as they can in the 3 sentences. The fourth and concluding sentence is, "What is my snack?" The rest of the class will guess what is in each mystery snack bag. Of course, this lesson would not be complete without eating the snacks!
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