Rainbow Verb Clouds

Throughout the current unit in our Reading Street Program our second graders have been learning about verbs. Students have discovered that verbs describe actions and they change depending on if they happened in the past, present, or the future. For example, students know that they would add an “ed” to “call” if it happened in the past or they would add an “s” to “call” if it is happening in the present. In order to practice this skill, we created something called “rainbow verb clouds”.

Each student was given a different verb such as “bake” or “dance”. First, students were responsible for drawing and cutting out a cloud on a white piece of paper and writing their verb on the cloud. The next step in these verb clouds was writing their verb in the past, present, and future tense on different colored strips of paper. After writing each verb tense, they were responsible for writing a sentence using each of these verb tenses on different colored strips of paper. For example, if a student had the verb “bake” he or she would write “bakes” for present tense and write an example sentence like “She bakes muffins today for dinner.” Students enjoyed building their own colorful clouds and thinking of sentences using these different verb tenses. Today these “rainbow verb clouds” are hanging around our classroom, bringing a bright pop of rainbow color to our day.