Contraction Surgery!

Today, my little second graders became surgeons! *sheds tear* I'm so very proud! 

No, but really though, we did surgery on words today! We have been learning all about how a contraction is really just two words squished into one word. One or two of the letters gets squished out of the original words when they get smashed together and those missing letters get replaced with a little "scar", the apostrophe.

The kiddos had a lot of fun with this activity. First, I wrote the two-word forms of the contractions we have been studying so far, such as "he is", "I will", "there is", "she will", etc. Then, I explained that surgery is when a surgeon has to cut a part of someone's body open so they can take out or fix something on the inside. I explained that the doctors give the person a shot of medicine to put them to sleep so they don't feel anything. So, then, modeled how students could choose any two words from the board to write on the two index cards given to them. We reviewed that a contraction is two words smashed together so ONE of the letters in one of the words was not "working properly" and THAT is why we needed to do surgery! 

So, we gave the word that was going to be cut a "shot" and then waited for the word to fall asleep, so it wouldn't feel anything, of course! ;) Then, we quietly cut the letter or letters off that the word didn't need because he was going to become a contraction. Then we connected our words together with a bandaid, placed on the word in the same way the apostrophe would look. 












Lastly, as I hung them up, I asked each student what two words they started with and what contraction they made, just to reinforce the main concept. The kids LOVED this!! They thought they were the coolest ever to be doing surgery on a word. I'll definitely be doing this activity with my classes from now on. Who knew contractions could be so fun?! =)  

Enjoy your moments today!