20 Hands-On Activities for Learning Idioms

20 Hands-on Activities For Learning Idioms

Fun and Fabulous Writing and Art Activities, Games, And Reproducibles to Develop Students' Understanding of These Colorful Expressions
Great for Second-Language Learners!
We've let the cat out of the bag! Learning to identify and understand idioms is easy and fun with creative activities your students will love. Complete with step-by-step directions and reproducible templates, these projects are effective ways to help students understand metaphors, find the relationships between language and life experience, and discover the fun of wordplay. Don't save these for a rainy day! Strike while the iron is hot!

Product Details

Publisher: Teaching Resources (August 1, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0439187230
ISBN-13: 978-0439187237

About the Author

Michael Gravois has used his classroom experience to write several books for Scholastic Teaching Resources, including: 35 Ready-to-Go Ways to Publish Students' Research & Writing, Ten Ready-to-Go Book Report Projects, and Make-and-Learn American History Notebooks—Exploration. His creativity and intuition about how kids learn translates strongly into the teaching materials he creates. Michael lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Reviews

I had seen this book attached to the Dictionary of Idioms, which I absolutely love, but the Activities for Learning Idioms leaves much to be desired for anyone teaching students beyond the 6th grade. There is a heavy concentration on coloring/cut/paste activities, making the bulk of the book inappropriate for any student beyond the 4th grade. The focus ends up being a list of idioms by type (for example: "Birds of a feather..." would fall under an animal worksheet/book, and the students would compile these 'animal' related idioms with the animal worksheet. Other themes include: Heart In the Right Place (heart related idioms, Day related idioms (Idioms that use 'day'), Idioms that use the five senses, Fire idioms, Number related idioms, Tree idioms, Colored themes, Food idioms). There are some games appropriate for all ages, but they seem very complicated for students with autism or low English skills.

There are also 4 pages of worksheets that encourage writing, but they are only effective for those students who have constantly heard idioms and can actively connect those common sayings.

Good projects in this work book include: Stressing the importance of linking the idiom to an appropriate usage and its true meaning. In addition, there are 2 or 3 sheets of 'draw' the meaning of an idiom. And finally, they do have a nice mini-glossary of idioms in the back of the book.

I would probably encourage anyone who needs to impliment an idiom based lesson plan to skip this book over unless they are willing to do the art and allow the students to invest time in to exploring meanings.