Adjectives & The Old House

If you've never been exposed to the books of Pamela Duncan Edwards, you are missing out.  She is the queen of alliteration with books like Dinorella and The Worrywarts.  However, the focus of the book we read this past week, The Old House, is not alliteration.  Rather it was chosen as a great way to introduce a study of adjectives.    The house goes from being a rickety, lonely old house to a beautiful house, full of life and love.  My students were fascinated with the transformation.   After reading it, we made a chart using adjectives to describe the old house before and after its renovation.

Then the kids made acrostic poems using adjectives beginning with each letter of their name to describe themselves.  This idea has been floating around pinterest and is definitely not orignial to me but my kids sure had fun with it.  I also gave them the Awesome Adjectives book (a little dictionary of adjectives) from this unit to help them think of words.  Here's the longest name in our class:

She did a great job choosing and thinking of words on her own including the word itchy!  A few weeks back I wrote down a funny quote from her where she proclaimed that she was so hot that her elbows were itchy.  You don't hear that every day! :)

And here's the newest addition to our class. 

She is from Sweden and doesn't speak any English at all. I told her she could do it in Swedish but according to the lady who is interpreting for her there aren't many adjectives in Swedish so she went for English instead.

 

Well, there you have it - we learned a lot about about adjectives and something interesting about the language of the Swedes!