Activities to Enrich Lessons 1. For a writing lesson have students write a letter to their hero.

Before students begin writing go over different parts of a letter and the definition of a hero. If students finish early have them spice up their writing by having them come up with different adjectives, noun or verbs to replace their old ones. 2. Have students write an acrostic poem using their name. Discuss different adjectives and verbs they can use to describe themselves. Then have students write an acrostic poem using someone elses name. Have students present their poems to the class. 3. To enrich a math lesson about money create a chart for students with columns labeled pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and dollars. Have students roll a die and put a number underneath each of the columns. After they have rolled the die enough times to fill up the first row underneath each column have them find the total amount of money. 4. If you are teaching a math lesson on multiplication, you can incorporate manipulatives for the students to use. This can help them understand that multiplication can be thought of as a groups of problem or as an array problem. 5. If you are teaching a lesson on adjectives, you can give the students different types of food. They can use the food to think of adjectives for touch, taste, and sight. They will be able to think of specific adjectives with the food rather than thinking of generic adjectives that may not be as descriptive. 6. If you are teaching a lesson about 3D shapes and explaining the different characteristics about them, you can have the students investigate them first in small groups to have them identify the different characteristics of them. Then, you can have the small groups of students explain their 3D shape to the class. Instead of just lecturing the students, you put the students in charge of their learning. They also get the chance to feel like an expert on a shape and teach the class about their shape. 7. When studying money, if students are counting up given sets of money to find the total value have students think of other possible ways to create the same total value using different coins. 8. For most math subjects you can have students create their own problems, similar to the problems you have been working on, to give to a partner. 9. When studying parts of speech, give students a sentence pattern (for example, article noun verb article adjective noun) and have students create sentences that follow the pattern.

10. For a geometry lesson about solid figures (e.g. cube, pyramid), allow students to make indentations of the figures in clay or play-doh to see that plane shapes make up 3D figures (e.g. square, triangle, etc). 11. When reviewing new word chunks for the week (e.g. "oi" and "oy"), teach the students a chant to help them remember the sounds. 12. After learning the new word wall words for the week, ask students to make a sentence with as many of the word wall words as they can. 13. When learning about bar graphs, get students up and moving by creating a human bar graph and having students stand (in one square floor tile) in the category they choose. 14. Both as an activity break and to reinforce knowledge, have students work in pairs or individually to make the shapes that the teacher calls out with their bodies. Call out "square" and students can choose to make it with their fingers, arms ,legs, feet, or whole bodies lying down. It's a great chance to be creative and learn shapes! 15. When teaching tangrams accompanying a logic lesson, I first let students make their own creations out of tangrams. When the novelty wore off, I challenged students to recreate the square that all seven pieces came from and I have never seen students work so diligently to achieve a goal.