Shoveling Snow and Scooping Up Nouns

I found the cutest shovel pattern and knew I had to use it for something.  We have been talking about nouns, adjectives and verbs... but decided to focus on nouns with this activity.  After talking about nouns and finding them in a shared reading I gave each of my students a pile of sticky notes and instructed them to look through a book that they were reading from their book box and search for nouns.  When they found one, they were to write it down on their sticky note.  They could find as many as they wanted but our magic number was ten.  They were very engaged during this process and amazingly all of them found 10 nouns or more.  I showed them my shovel and told them they were going to make a shovel (their color choice) and write all their nouns on it.  I checked each child's sticky notes before they could use a sharpie marker (they LOVED this) to write their nouns. Here is a picture of a couple of the shovels.

We used cotton balls in the corner for the snow.  We first used white crayon but ended up using cotton for an added touch! What I love about these shovels is you can see the differentiation as many of the nouns varied by the independent book they were reading.  I bet if you looked closely you could even guess the book or type of book they were reading.  

I would love to share the shovel pattern with you, but unfortunately it was just a few pieces of paper I found in one of my files I picked up somewhere from long ago.  My scanner is broken here at home, but I will try to scan it in at school if possible later this week if you are interested.  Here is how our wall turned out with all of our shovels. Our title is:  "We've got the SCOOP on Nouns!"  

Hope your day is a great one!

UPDATE:  Here are the scanned pages you can download.  I'm sorry about the quality.  I have no idea where I originally got these from so if anyone knows the origin or the creator... let me know! :)  Click on the images to download the patterns.

Hope you find some use for these! :)