Figuratively speaking....

This week, Kakapo have been working on Figurative Language.

We have been doing a few different tasks focusing on our learning about metaphors, similes, personification, alliteration, onomatopoeia and idioms. 

Powerful Paragraphs 💥

In our literacy warm up's we have been looking at an image.  We use the photo to write a moment in time OR describe what we see.

We look carefully at the photo using our senses.  We look with our maths eyes.  We look with our imaginations.  We look at the small details.

We have ten minutes to write.  After we have written we have time to check back over our paragraph.  We share and discuss.  We share the figurative language we have heard.  As an audience could we imagine what was happening? Were we hooked? Did we want to know more...

We then have some time to rework our paragraphs.  We are trying to improve our paragraphs by checking for language features and organisation, spelling, punctuation. Do we have different sentence types to add interest?  

We share with a buddy and check again.  

Idioms 📕

In our contracts there has been a different idiom.  Without googling or asking someone we need to explain what we think the idiom means.  Our first idiom was "never judge a book by its cover"  

Poetry Bus Stop 🚌

We had five different poems spread around the room and a information chart of figurative language. We read the poem and discussed as a group what language features we found in the poem.  Then, Mrs Cutler would yell "BUS STOP" which means we moved to a different poem.  We could go to whatever poem we wanted to each time we moved.  This was a fun way of identifying language features.  

Check out our individual blogs to see some of our Powerful Paragraph examples! 

Kakapo Confessions

We read William Carlos Williams poem "This is Just to Say" about him admitting, and apologising for eating plums without asking. We discussed what it means to admit or confess something.

Kakapo kids brainstormed their confessions and ideas.

Using a similar format to Williams poem, children wrote their own poems.  We spent a lot of time re-working our writing to ensure we had interesting words that created a picture for the reader.  For example - rather than using 'yummy' to describe a chocolate, 'gooey' was used.

When it came to publishing our poems the criteria was to use a background image that related to their confession. The font had to be readable - so we had to think about the background picture.  Can the words be seen with a different colour, or was a bolder font or highlighting needed?

Children worked on a shared document to publish their poems.  There was a few challenges around this (such as accidental deletion of slides) but these were ironed out quickly luckily.

We really enjoyed reading each others poems.  We have given each other feedback and have reflected on things we may change if we did this task again.

You can read the poems by checking out the individual blogs.  We'd love to hear what you think so please leave a comment!