Thursday, November 6, 2008

Crexaggerate...A New Portmanteau(x)

One of Room 503's most recent vocabulary words was portmanteau(x) (spelled correctly with or without the "x") - a new word created by merging two existing words (i.e. "brunch" and "smog").

Today, the Sixth Graders created and exaggerated in both their Drama and Language Arts classes, and so I have taken it upon myself to bestow upon our classwork a new portmanteau(x): crexaggerate - which means: to creatively exaggerate and/or to exaggerate creatively (depending).

In Drama, we began with one person telling a very simple story about their morning. Another student then took the story and added some detail to it. The next student added more and then the next went completely over the top. I likened the idea of the telling and retelling of the stories to the inverse idea of Matryoshkas, or Russian Nesting Dolls: instead of getting smaller in size as one opens one doll after another, the story would get bigger as it was retold over and over.

First we orally told the story, over and over. Then we began a new story where the story had to be told and retold not only verbally, but physically as well. Finally, a story was told verbally by one student while another acted out the story physically.

During Language Arts, the students were encouraged to get creative - and most even got a bit wacky - using specific vocabulary words, characters from all the different literary works we've read so far this semester and a phrase from the Mother Teresa piece we learned. Some of the students shared their stories out loud with the class, and each one, though containing similar elements, was incredibly - and crexaggeratedly - different.

Our day, like our writing pieces, was also different - and I'm not exaggerating: we had to get creative about our bathroom usage. Due to some bad overflow, we had to - for a time - use the bathrooms across the street at the church. We are hoping for a much easier flowing day tomorrow.

And so it is.

Cheers,
Ms. Pitman