Grade 3 EAL - In Class Support 

Character Traits

While musing over how to make our students use more adjectives in their writing, I decided to begin with a less challenging activity. Our students were offered to listen to a story about The Sneaky Rabbit, read the text of the story and highlight the adjectives. 

Next, we had a group discussion to help some students check their understanding of the adjectives and add some to the highlighted list. The children had a chance to share their thinking and argue about whether certain words were adjectives or not.

After selecting the adjectives in a group effort and talking about why they were chosen by the author, the students had to write an exposition about the story and use most of the adjectives we had focused on.

The task could be extended by asking the students to change the ending or even the characters.

The children were engaged and liked the story. When writing their stories the students were quiet and focused. The teaching team reminded the children to edit for punctuation, capitalization and the past tense. When the writing session was over, the students had to pair-share and provide the feedback. Listening to their peers helped the students to reflect on their work and enhance their list of adjectives.

Miss Lisa's class.