I recently noticed that my first grade friends were having difficulty with contractions. They were “using but confusing” apostrophes and they were having trouble with the grammar vocabulary. I can’t blame them, there are so many words that start with “c” – contraction, conjunction, compound words, etc!
I decided to have a little fun with contractions. I searched for a video and found the one below. It does not start out exciting, but it has the students listen to a One Direction (ah!) song and count up all the contraction words that are in it. We had a ball doing that!
After we watched the video, we created a Google Doc of our favorite contractions. Each student in the class thought of one.
The last thing we did was make kites out of our favorite contractions! I found the idea on The Weekly Hive and downloaded her freebie. I made a new pattern for the kite just using the shapes on Pages because I wanted it to be a tad bigger. My students had a blast decorating them. The room was silent…you always know they are working hard when that happens! ; ) We loved them so much we ended up hanging them in our room! What I love the most about them is listening to them read the contractions constantly. That is a sign that our learning stuck!
