Figurative Language, Text Features, and a Celebrity Visit

September is over! Can you believe it? We are officially done with our first month of school AND I’m halfway done with conferences!!! It’s going to be a well-deserved, long weekend before we get back to work and don’t have another day off until Veteran’s Day.

Over the past eight days of school we have covered Figurative Language and Text Features. Yes. You heard me correctly! In a span of eight days. In my opinion that is a lot to do in a little bit of time, but somehow we managed!

We started our study by discussing the difference between Literal and Figurative Language using a presentation that I created.

After we went through a few examples of each together, I had them independently cut out and sort sentences.

You can grab the presentation and the sort from my store by clicking here.

Next we went over one or two different types of figurative language each day and took notes on our interactive notebook pages from Life in Fifth Grade.

We wrote down the definition and an example of each type:

We also completed a practice worksheet for each type that I will eventually add to the product I currently have in my store.

I also keep these adorable posters (that are included in the same product) up all year for students to reference when needed:

One of the last things that we did to review before our test was to play a Figurative Language Kahoot that I made using questions from the Virginia Power Test question database. My students LOVE Kahoot, and it’s free, so if you haven’t tried it out I would definitely recommend it! You can click the picture below to play my Kahoot if you’d like to 🙂

Text Features:
We only had three days to cover text features, so I wasn’t able to be quite as creative with this unit.
I introduced Text Features using these lovely, free posters from Primary Punch as a powerpoint/interactive notebook page. What I mean by that is I projected the posters on the SMARTboard and printed out tiny copies of them for my students to glue into their notebooks. For each new slide, they had to find their mini poster to match it, glue it into their notebook, and write a little blurb about how that feature helps them when they are reading nonfiction text.

Once we covered all of the features, we did a quick close reading activity and some practice test questions. Our state tests don’t just ask them to identify text features or how they help readers, but will say crazy things like, “Which paragraph could have the heading Early Years,” or, “Which paragraph is best supported by this photograph”.

Because I want them to get used to these types of questions, I am in the process of creating worksheets with this test language to go along with some Scholastic News for Kids articles. This one goes with the Article A National Treasure about the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Feel free to take & use this one with your class!

Finally, we created Text Features posters using an article that I found in a National Geographic magazine and these cute, free labels from Create Teach Share.

(On the paper stapled to the back of their posters I made them explain how each feature helped them read and understand this article)

Celebrity Visit:
 Last week, amidst the eight days that were already jam-packed with instruction, we got to spend half a day with three famous athletes! Our amazing P.E. Teacher entered our school to win a visit from a U.S. Olympian, and we ended up having three members of the U.S. Track & Field team come to our school. These were not just any Olympians either – all three of them competed and won medals in Rio this summer so this was a pretty big deal for us! Check out my video of the day here.

Since we are starting Structural Patterns next week and I think we need to review Text Features a bit more, I created a nonfiction piece about Michelle Carter (who was SO wonderful with our students) and included questions to review both concepts. Click the picture below if you are interested in checking out this free product!