Episode 3: A Vocabulary-Building Onomatopoeia Lesson

Last month, we kicked off our figurative language unit with an onomatopoeia lesson. I actually did not intend to start this way…my first instinct was to give an overview of all figurative language with a set of slides I had purchased years ago.

The slides themselves are fantastic! But as I watched my students’ faces, I quickly realized my multilingual learners needed something a bit more concrete to bring this language to life. And I needed to help them build vocabulary for each type of figurative language.

I found myself thinking, once again (like in my realization with our word study) that I would NEVER have approached a new concept like this when I was teaching math.

So I started over from the beginning, by breaking down our language standard:

And then began by introducing just ONE piece of figurative language: onomatopoeia.

I knew I wanted a way to launch our onomatopoeia lesson with Roller Coaster by Marla Frazee. This book is filled with fantastic examples of onomatopoeia!

But I also wanted to make the concept concrete before reading the book. So I found this two-minute POV video of a classic wooden roller coaster. 

After introducing the term onomatopoeia, I asked my students to listen closely to the sounds in the video. “How would you name these sounds with words?” I asked. Then we watched the video.

My students were SO excited and quickly began calling out the sounds they heard…from the “tick tick tick” of the coaster being pulled up the hill to the “Eeeeee!” of the riders screaming down the track.

I recorded a list of the words as they called them out on our whiteboard.

NOW we were ready for the read aloud. I used our document camera as I read and my students were able to find examples of onomatopoeia in the text with ease!

And seeing phrases like “clickity clackity” made SO much more sense after experiencing the sounds of a roller coaster in video form.

But what to do next? I know I wanted to build my students’ vocabulary with more examples of onomatopoeia.

And while there are a TON of fantastic picture books out there with onomatopoeia, I knew the examples in each book would be limited.

So I decided to go out of my math comfort zone and made a set of onomatopoeia task cards:

I knew this would be the easiest way to introduce a TON of onomatopoeia…I embedded 75 examples in those task cards!

I wanted my multilingual students to not only find onomatopoeia, but to also think about the meaning of this language. So I created a little twist:

Each card featured a “mystery” to figure out, so my students could use the onomatopoeia they had discovered, while working on their inferencing skills.

It was an absolute hit! We worked on half of the cards on the first day…and my students flew back in the next day, begging to work on the task cards again!

Now that we have a huge collection of onomatopoeia, we’ve begun organizing them on anchor charts by category (more to come on this later).

My students in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade absolutely LOVE exclaiming, “that’s onomatopoeia!” as we read new stories together.

Even better? They’ve begun using the words we’ve gathered in their writing pieces! Which tells me they’ve gained a true understanding of this figurative language.

I hope these ideas will be of some help if you are looking for something a bit more concrete to introduce onomatopoeia.

Have you tried using a video for this concept before? Let me know what you think!