N
ever fear! Variety is here! Being a great teacher means changing things up a bit and surprising your students with a bit of fun and laughter. After all, we know that we learn and assimilate knowledge better when we are in a comfortable and happy environment.
The web is a great way to stay up to date on educational technology that can be used in classrooms. It’s also helpful to search for interesting activities and games that have been tried and recommended by other teachers. A terrific website with lots of ideas, mainly around art, had this really fun and simple game called Adjective Adjective Noun. This activity covers two subjects: art and grammar. It’s a good activity for breaking the ice in the beginning of the year. Why? Because without fail the whole room will be laughing and having fun within minutes.
All you need to complete this activity:
- Pencils
- Recording sheet
- Paper cut into strips
- Crayons, colored pencils, or markers
In advance of the activity, cut paper into many strips just long enough for one or two words. Divide the strips into piles, one having about twice as many as the other. I used some colored card stock to help distinguish between the two piles. Next you will need to come up with lots of good adjectives and nouns. Here is a random adjective noun generator if you get stuck! Fill up the larger amount of strips with one adjective each. Use fun, simple, and easy to portray adjectives as much as possible. Write one noun on each of the remaining strips. Keep the adjectives and nouns separate, and place them in two piles facing down.
You can either place the piles on paper place and pass them around so each student can take two adjectives and one noun. You can also place them face down on a table and have students take turns coming up to choose their strips of paper. If you need to, reuse the papers by having the student write the words on his or her recording sheet and mix them back into the piles. When everyone has two adjectives and one noun, they can start drawing! They need to DRAW the phrases they get. Examples of what might come up are:
Wiggly wet mouse
Furry pink lampshade
Frozen red movie star
Slippery fast calculator
You can see how funny things can get. Make sure they all hold up their pictures for 
everyone else to see. Children love this activity and the bonus is they probably won’t ever need reminding about adjectives and nouns in the future. It also builds their confidence in drawing because there are no expectations except to portray the idea they ended up with.
To extend this activity, you can have students cover their words on their record sheet with a piece of paper or by folding the paper back. They can ask other students to try to guess what their noun and adjectives were.
If you’d like to use my record sheet to use with your students, you can download it for free here.
