My name is Sally Calvert.
I'm a Grade 5-6 teacher at East Ivanhoe Primary School.
I've been teaching here for 11 years.
I have composite Grade 5-6.
I have 16 Grade 6 students and 11 Grade 5 students.
One of those students is on the autism spectrum
and we have a couple of students with auditory issues,
one with auditory processing issues
and a couple with hearing deficit.
But, on the whole,
most of the students are working at level and above level.
They're quite a capable group of students.
In today's lesson on figurative language,
I've selected different activities
according to the abilities
and also a range of resources
because I think it's really important to actually engage the students
by using a variety of resources.
You might be comparing...
..hair.
You might be wanting to make your writing really interesting
and trying to think of a way that you can describe a character.
One of the activities involves students watching a video
of the poem 'The Highwayman',
then reading the text, identifying examples of figurative language,
and entering those examples onto a Word document on their computers.
Another group are going to be working in a teaching group with me.
We'll be running a guided reading session.
We'll be using a text
but also using the interactive television,
and the children will be actually highlighting
examples of figurative language
using the interactive television.
OK, you can read the rest of the paragraph in your books
and see if you can identify - whilst Natasha's doing that -
see if you can identify
the next type of figurative language there might be.
There's a hyperbole of,
"The stitching looks like it will last longer than you will."
Ah.
For this activity, the students are going to be looking at some pictures
which show the literal meaning of an idiom.
They'll then complete their own flip books,
so they'll use a website that is an online dictionary of idioms
and they'll find an idiom that they're going to illustrate.
I thought the lesson went really well.
The figurative language rap, I thought,
was a really engaging way
to actually revise the learning that we'd done
about figurative language.
The children - I could see from their faces -
were really engaged in that.
The activities went well.
The video, once they actually got to watch it,
they got a lot from it
and it did give them the overview that I wanted for them
to then look at the text and identify the examples of figurative language.
The reading group discussion was really valuable.
The children were really thinking
about an author's purpose for writing.
Highlighting things using the interactive whiteboard
is always something that students really enjoy doing.
The interesting thing I find with resources
is that I can have all the digital resources -
using the notebooks,
but when it comes down to activities that still use pen and paper,
like the flip book activity that we did,
the enjoyment levels from the children are there -
they were really engaged in that task
and really proud of the work that they produced.
So from here, I'm hoping to see
that their writing is going to benefit
from all the learning that we've done about figurative language.
So I'm really looking to see some really rich descriptions
in their narrative writing
in the next few weeks as we focus on narrative writing.