Application Phonemic Awareness Activity in the Classroom

Onomatopoeia Comic Book

(Phonemic Awareness Activity)

·        Gifted seventh grade English/Language Arts Class (two ELL students)

·        Students are finishing a unit on narrative writing

·        Students have two writings for this unit a personal narrative, which they wrote first and now a fictional narrative

·        Students were given the task of individually creating a super hero, villain, and a conflict

·        In class students used a plot outline to develop their stories

·        Stories were peer edited and then revised

·        Students were taken to the school computer lab to type their stories

·        Each student printed two copies of his/her story. One copy of the story was given to the teacher for grading the other for the students to use in creating a comic book.

·        To begin this portion of the project the teacher gives a definition of onomatopoeia (defined by Webster’s as “the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it – as buzz, hiss”) and how it is used in comic books

·        Students brain stormed onomatopoeia words that might be useful in their stories. The words were then written on the white board. This quickly became wild and crazy with students trying to outdo one another with unusual  sounds and spelling(s) of sounds. Of the two ELL students only the boy became very involved in calling out sounds of various actions, he was not as vocal with the spellings. The girl, who is always quiet, did seem to work well in her small group but not in the larger group.   

·        After creating an extensive list of onomatopoeia words

·        The teacher then copied the list of onomatopoeia words on to index cards

·        Each student picked two of the face down index cards and finds a place in his/her that the words will fit

·        We added students swapping cards when the word was also needed by someone else.

·        Because students had been peer editors on several different papers they felt obliged to suggest onomatopoeia words to others. Gifted kids, you gotta lov’em.