Journey North Instructional Strategies

Instructional Activities

Alliteration

Back to
40 Best-practices
Instructional Strategies

Background: Alliteration is a sentence that includes a series of words that begin with the same letter/sound. Students like to call them “Tongue Twister” phrases. Examples of alliterative sentences: High-powered hummers hover at flowers searching for nectar. Meandering manatees move gracefully through the warm waters of the river’s run.

Procedures: Students collect facts about a topic from a variety of reading materials. Using key ideas collected from their research, students write three-word clusters that describe the topic. All words in the cluster start with the same letter. Invite students to use the cluster phrases to write fact sentences or alliteration poems. Encourage students to illustrate their work.

Examples:(Alliteration Poem) Collared Caribou, Ready for your Click-Clack Crossing, Hidden by Hundreds in your Herd, Tracked through the Tundra, Eating Luscious Lichen.

Variations: After students have written alliterative poems with researched facts, invite them to present the poems in choral readings. Create a class picture book of fact poems.

Reading Strategies: Activate Prior Knowledge, Visualize Ideas from Text, Build Vocabulary, Identify Main Ideas and Details, Summarize Information, Synthesize Ideas, Make Connections