Sentence Surgery! Room Transformation Lesson

After reading The Wild Card by Hope and Wade King I (Stacie) decided that we needed to become super creative with some of the content we teach.

At the beginning of the year, it always seems that third graders have a sudden issue with punctuation, capitalization, and subject-verb agreement. This year I wanted to do something crazy to help students focus on this and to really take what they are doing to heart.

Maria and I decided to do sentence surgery and create an experience the kids would not forget.

Is there a doctor in the house? There were 26 in fact! It was the most amazing lesson and the kids couldn't stop talking about it. In hindsight, it was simple to plan and to undertake but it was a jump off the creative bridge into the unknown - this lesson could have gone south quickly- but it was all worth it!

Mrs. Lopez ready for surgery

I bought isolation gowns, o.r. caps, and face masks from Amazon. Don't you just love Amazon? The gowns were a bit pricey ($45) but I got 100 of them so I can use them for future lessons.  I created a sentence fragments and complete sentences to provide each pair of students. The intention was that they would match up the fragments and make complete sentences but it turned out so much better than that because the kids cut up all of the sentence fragments and created complex sentences using different pieces of several different original pairs that I had planned.
number of

Maria and I went out to pick up our class from lunch in our gear - we told the kids that there was an emergency in our room and that they would all need to conduct surgery in order to save the many patients that they had waiting. They were so excited and shocked by what was happening.

Maria, our vice principal, Mrs. Lopez, and I put each student in their operating outfits and had them stand by their tables. They were given directions to discuss their "patients" and to diagnosis what was wrong before making any surgical decisions. They were completely engaged, Maria and I gained a lot of formative assessment information about
students and they are all working very hard now to ensure that they continue to correctly use capitals and punctuation correctly.

Mrs. Lopez recorded the lesson for us, you can see the majority of it (the last 10 minutes are not recorded as she had to leave the room to address another issue) here.

Students couldn't wait to share what they did when they got home and many of them took the gowns with them to show their parents. We kept the caps and masks for future work editing and revising our work. The kids put them on when editing and revising and they love it!

What is one of the most engaging lessons you have taught? What gave you the idea for approaching it the way you did?


**Please note that this post is cross-posted to my blog, Making Over Third Grade.**