I have been looking for fun, engaging, and meaningful ways for my first grade ELL students to apply their learning. Recently we have been learning about adjectives - what they are, how we use them, why we use them. After focusing on describing things by color, size, and texture it dawned on me that they could create their own "I Spy" books. Once I showed my students examples of "I Spy" books and we played "I Spy," they were instantly excited to create their own. Our books varied from the traditional "I Spy" books in that they identified the objects they were describing by circling them in their photo. This allowed me to assess their application of adjectives. The students loved the project. They were engaged the entire time and were excited to help each other create clues and share ideas. It was also easy to challenge students who were ready to be pushed by asking them to use more specific details, or simplify for students who were struggling by focusing on one category of adjectives like color. I'm already seeing many of my ELL students improving their adjective-noun order.
Below are the steps we followed to create our books.
- Collect a set of objects and take a photo
- Using the mark-up tool, circle three objects to describe
- Using pages (landscape photo book) add marked-up photo to a page
- Write the "I Spy" clues. Ex: I spy a tiny white heart, a big yellow bear, and a long red pencil.
- Using audio recording, read the "I Spy" clue
- EPUB/publish the book to be kept in student's library
Attach up to 5 files which will be available for other members to download.