Thanks to Pinterest My class had unbelievable fun while learning about contractions.  I found Contraction Surgery in several places on Pinterest so gave it a try.  We spread white paper across the tables of each of our 4 groups... Operating Rooms 1-4.  Students put on latex free medical masks and gloves.  They used scalpels  scissors to perform surgery on their patients words forming contractions.  After all four of their patients were in recovery they had to consult with another doctor, get a second opinion, on the result of their surgery.  I found inexpensive masks and gloves and bandages at Walmart.  Too fun for words!!!!!

             I'm working on teaching visualizing and inferring with poetry.   I used ideas from Debbie Miller's Reading With Meaning starting with reading selected poems from Georgia Heard's Creatures of the Earth, Sea, and Sky.  I wrote one poem on a chart and we inferred together.  Then working in pairs students read a copy of a poem from

Georgia Heard's book and inferred the animal the poem was about.  

   
The next day I read selected poems from Alma Flor Ada's Gathering the Sun.  Then students worked independently to record in pictures and words what they inferred and visualized after reading the poem.

Then I read Anne Mazer's Salamander Room aloud without showing the pictures and asked students to draw a picture of the boy's room.  We taped them all to the white board and talked about why they were different.  How our background knowledge and experiences (schema) were all different affecting what we visualized and drew. 

The next day I played several nature tapes while student drew what they visualized.  The following day I played the same tapes and students wrote words that came to their mind.  Finally on the third day students took the words and formed them into poems.