Do your kids love jokes? My first graders LOVED telling me jokes. First grade seems to be the time kids begin to understand jokes and what makes them funny.
My own 2nd grader really has a good handle on jokes now and even makes up his own. But many of the more complicated jokes we have to explain. About a year ago, when he was in first grade, I remember his reading us jokes from a joke book he had gotten for Christmas. Several of them we were explaining to him, because he didn't quite understand what was so funny.
It was then that I had an idea for a group of lessons! We could use jokes to learn different language and grammar skills in the classroom! Now that I am homeschooling him for 2nd grade, we have started doing "Funny Fridays" and learning some jokes. Here are the routines we use for learning language and grammar skill through jokes and puns.
What Skills Can Be Taught Through Jokes?
Comedians are extremely high in linguistic intelligence and it's easy to know why when you think about the language skills you have to know to understand and tell jokes. Jokes are packed FULL of so many language skills like...
- homonyms
- homophones
- similar sounding words (helping with phonemic awareness and phoneme differentiation)
- metaphors
- idioms
- academic vocabulary
Whole Group Joke Telling
We check to see if anyone got the correct answer. Then, we talk about what might be so funny about this joke. I ask, "Do you get it??" and have some kids explain why they think it's funny. Most of the time someone will get it, but I've had a few they didn't get.
If no one gets it, we go on to the last slide. (And we still go over this slide together even when someone explains it.)
No comments