Contraction Surgery

This week we are working on contractions for spelling. This is a concept that many students have a tough time understanding. I found this activity last year and it was so successful I tried it again with this group.

Today, we were contraction surgeons!  We started by building a little background knowledge talking about what a surgeon actually does. Once everyone understood the concept, I showed them how they were going to be word surgeons by cutting open some words and then "stitching" them back together.

I paired the students up and gave each of them a sentence strip with 2 words. Their job was to take the words and preform surgery to turn them into their contraction form. To make the apostrophe, we used bandaids!  Everyone had a blast, and I think it really helped them to understand the concept of a contraction.