If a Moose Joined the Circus! Trust me, you will love this!!! (Freebies Included!)

Dear Sweet Blogger Friends,
                 

           You will not believe how much fun I am having with our circus theme! The kiddies are, simply put, creating absolute masterpieces! I am seeing so much progress and effort from these little kiddies!! I loooooooveeee it!!! 

           Here is my latest lesson which can be done in several parts. I don't know about all of you but my kiddies have been experiencing some difficulties with punctuation, most especially placing capitals in the right places. Thus, I decided to create a circus themed Smart Board lesson on editing! 

I chose to use the book:

I adapted it to fit my lesson plan needs as well as to incorporate ideas and concepts that would suit my follow up lesson. 

I used part of the story to create my Smart board lesson and left many spelling errors for my students to edit. Read the description below to better understand how to use the lesson and 

download your free copy of the notebook file here

Smartboard Editing Activity

How to use the activity!

Read the sentences on each slide. Have the students come up and circle the grammatical errors. Once completed, pull up the shade for the edited version of the text and check if they missed anything! All previous mistakes have been corrected in red font. 

This 10 slide activity is sure to be a successful editing introduction. With emphasis placed on proper nouns, capitals, punctuation and even a small introduction to quotation marks (for your more advanced students) it will motivate your students to pay closer attention to sentence structure and grammar during writing assignments. Tried and true! 

It is important to mention that at the end of the story (included in Smart board file) Morris the Moose expresses his disappointment with regards to the fact that there are no moose in the circus. Boris the Bear, who at this point is at his wits end with Morris' silly questions and comments (told you it would make the kiddies laugh!) sighs and tells him to join the circus!

At this point, my students are asked to discuss various circus jobs and acts. We brainstorm together and then write a class story entitled "If a Moose Joined the Circus." I took the opportunity to discuss the present, past and future tenses with my kiddies. At this point, we have almost always written stories in the present tense. This was a great way for them to practice using "ed," "would have" etc...

Upon writing our class story about a moose called Bouncy the Clown, the students were asked to go back to their seats and create their own stories. They did an absolute amazing job! Talk about creativity! We had moose juggling, lion taming, telling jokes, practicing magic! It is amazing what they come up with!

Tell me these are not the cutest ever!!

You can download the templates for the "moose parts" and copy them to construction paper.

Download here:

Moose face and details

Moose antlers and details

Moose eyes and teeth

Hope you enjoy this activity! I sure did and the kiddies loved it too!

P.S. Please like my Facebook Page!!!