Wild About Writing Wednesday... Onomatopoeia

In my quest to find ideas for teaching writing right from the beginning of the school year, I came across a lesson on the craft of using onomatopoeia in the book I Can Write Like That! a Guide to Mentor Texts and Craft Studies for Writer's Workshop, K-6 and thought what a simple and great way to start the school year writing. Just like adding simple labels, our youngest writers can add onomatopoeia or words that describe sound to their writing pieces.

The use of onomatopoeia and alliteration are abundant in children's literature and can easily be identified by our youngest learners so they are both perfect crafts to start with when teaching writing. Begin by selecting mentor texts containing onomatopoeia- some books may be filled with onomatopoeia while others may contain just one or two choice examples.  

possible mentor texts for this craft...

Encourage your students to find differences in the ways the different books use onomatopoeia. Guide them to see the various distinctions between the kinds of onomatopoeia used in books such as animal sounds, indoor sounds, nature sounds, action sounds, etc. A Tree Map would be a great way to chart these different types of sound words. 

Have students close their eyes and listen for the different sounds around them for 30 seconds. Then have them share the sounds they heard. Chart their ideas. As a class come up with an onomatopoeic word to describe the sound. For example: "tap, tap, tap" or "scratch, scratch" or "eeek, eeek, eeek", etc. Chart the new words with pictures that match the sounds. Take students outside the classroom to find new sounds. Stop periodically and draw their attention to new sounds. 

As a class, create a shared writing piece based on a class listening walk. Use the book The Listening Walk as a model for the piece. Invite students to give onomatopoeic words to fill in the sentences. Transfer the story to smaller sheets of paper. Then have students work together to illustrate the sentences.  

This is a kindergarten example from the book. 

This craft is a great place to start because it is so readily found in children's books, children can relate to it, and it brings the writing down to 1-3 words. If you know of other great mentor texts for teaching onomatopoeia please share them in a comment below.