Friday, March 29, 2013

Alliteration-Teaching Figurative Language with Mentor Text

For all of us who need to teach alliteration, it can be a daunting task to think of examples of alliteration. I found myself bumbling through, trying to think of a sentence that had alliteration. It is far more difficult to have our students provide examples of alliteration. "Danny does dinner d-d-...Uh, I don't know."  It can be even more difficult to find examples of alliteration within our texts. I have found a collection of mentor texts you can use with your students to help teach this particular type of figurative language. I know that once I used these books, my students really grabbed a hold of the concept, and more readily identified alliteration in a story or novel we were reading.

I have a special treat for you! If you comment, I'll e-mail you a template to use with one of the books (The Z was Zapped) that my dear friend, Diana, gave me years ago. I love it!

We make a class alliteration book. Every student in my class signs up for a letter. I give them a die-cut of that letter, and they have to trace the letter, and come up with a design on their page in the book that matches their sentence.

For example: Mice mischievously mismatched many mathematical messages. 
The student would have a picture of mice making errors in mathematical messages. You would be surprised by how well they do! We put the book out for Open House, and the parents always enjoy seeing their child's work. I also leave copies of all the mentor texts for Alliteration to serve as a model for the parents.

The Z was Zapped by Chris Van Allsburg






The Absolutely Awful Alphabet by Mordical Gerstein












A is for Angry: an animal and adjective alphabet by Sandra Boynton


LMNO Peas by Keith Baker


Animalia by Graeme Base

These are books I do not own :(

 


If you have any books you have in your collection that you could think to add, please let me know. I'd love to hear from you.