Brewer Elementary
Hill/Rowe/Waters – Addie Newcomer
Learning Objective/Exit Outcomes:
- Students will be able to participate collaboratively with their classmates.
- Students will be able to tell a silly story.
- Students will be able to insert proper punctuation into the story, including capitalization, full sentences, and proper tense.
- Students will be able to think on their feet and be flexible with shifting their point of view to support the team.
Integration Area/Subject:
ELA & Theatre
State Standards:
ELAGSE1L1 Demonstrates command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
- Print all upper- and lowercase letters.
- Use common, proper, and possessive nouns.
- Use singular and plural nouns with matching verbs in basic sentences (e.g., He hops; We hop).
- Use personal, possessive, and indefinite pronouns (e.g., I, me, my; they, them, their, anyone, everything).
- Use verbs to convey a sense of past, present, and future (e.g., Yesterday I walked home; Today I walk home; Tomorrow I will walk home).
- Use frequently occurring adjectives.
- Use frequently occurring conjunctions (e.g., and, but, or, so, because).
- Use determiners (e.g., articles, demonstratives).
- Use frequently occurring prepositions (e.g., during, beyond, toward).
- Produce and expand complete simple and compound sentences in response to questions and prompts (declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory).
- Print with appropriate spacing between words and sentences.
ELAGSE1L2 Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.
- Capitalize dates and names of people.
- Use end punctuation for sentences.
- Use commas in dates and to separate single words in a series.
- Use conventional spelling for words with common spelling patterns and for frequently occurring irregular words.
- Spell untaught words phonetically, drawing on phonemic awareness and spelling conventions.
TA1.CR.1 Organize, design, and refine theatrical work.
- Use imagination to create, revise, and/or add to ideas.
- Demonstrate skills of the mind (e.g. imagination, focus, concentration).
- Follow directions and contribute to planning in theatre experiences.
- Listen to others with respect and courtesy in an ensemble.
Materials/Playing Space:
Open space at the front of the classroom
Description:
The teacher picked four volunteers to come up to the front of the class while their classmates sat on the carpet to be a good audience. The teacher had students use Four-Headed Expert to answer a topic such as “How I get ready in the morning.”
For Four-Headed Expert, four students make up an “expert” and each student gives one word to a sentence that is being created by the group. For example:
Student 1: “In”
Student 2: “the”
Student 3: “morning”
Student 4: “I”
Student 1: “wake”
Student 2: “up”
Student 3: “and”
Student 4: “get”, etc…
Each student was only allowed to speak one word of the story at a time, so they had to think on their feet and be flexible as their story grew and developed. When it was time for punctuation, they spoke the punctuation into the story while the teacher transcribed it on the whiteboard. The class was working on three things in a series, so students were encouraged to work together as a team to write and properly punctuate three items in a series in their story.
Notes:
This strategy is flexible and easily adjustable. Since Dr. Seuss week is coming up, the students were encouraged to be silly and incorporate things into their story that were wacky and unrealistic. If the class has a hard time sitting still on the carpeting, this strategy can be executed from the desks. Students can participate in this strategy silently by passing a sheet of paper around the table and writing one word on the page per student.