Grammar Surgery Day Transformation!

Grammar Surgery Day was an unforgettable day in our classroom! This worked as a comprehensive review of many different standards we learned in grammar this year. It was relatively low cost and we had donations that helped as well. I’ll try and walk you through the steps of what we did.

Checklist available at end of post! Diplomas printed just from a Google search. Masks were donated.

The small glue sticks were from Dollar Tree. Gloves, gowns, and masks were donated by our local clinic! We kept them in relatively good shape so we can use next year. The hand sanitizer and bandaids were just from our first aid kit — all placed on cookie sheets from my house.

Here’s another look at some of our supplies.

Students came in and received a gown and doctor badge. You can download my doctor badges here – I created unique titles for all my students based on their interest and just used pictures we had from earlier in the year.

I had all the surgeries laid out on the back table with the supplies needed for each. We had 3 “operating rooms” with the students working in groups.

These were just Dollar Tree table cloths!! Really cheap. I had the students divided into groups on the board and we took our “hippocratic” oath and got our pre-op instructions before we got started .

They set off to work and I monitored the rotations to make sure the groups all weren’t doing the same one. I bounced between surgeries and they had to get their score/check off before moving on to the next one. I had answer keys ready and if they made more than 5 errors they had to stop look it over and fix it. I also had to make sure that each team member was working – which was tough for a couple of my kids.

It might not look like much but those 9 surgeries involved:

1. suturing vocab words to defintions

2. stapling figurative language words, definitions, and examples

3. using noodles to punctuate dialogue

4. color coding parts of speech

5. blood typing ordering adjectives

and more !!

Check out these 2 documents for planning!

Here are the activities we did. and some signs for the surgeries.

I kept all the envelopes for next year and copies to make sure we can do it again. I had such a great day and the kids had a blast. It took us about 3 hours to complete all the surgeries.

Posted in 4th grade, grammar, teaching, technology

9 Comments

Becky on June 22, 2016 at 5:52 pm

Not sure if it is just me/my computer, but I can't see any pictures in this post. 🙁

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Amber on June 22, 2016 at 9:56 pm

It should be fixed now! I was trying to link but it didn't work so I just uploaded. Hope this is something you can do with your class!

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Amanda K on June 23, 2016 at 12:49 pm

Oh my gosh, what an amazing memorable event in your classroom! I love it. I would love to try this out in my classroom too. Grammar is just not that exciting to teach and you have found a great way to excite kids about it. I'm so excited about this! Thank you for sharing!!

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Jen on June 23, 2016 at 4:40 pm

This is fantastic! I love these kinds of big magical teaching experiences that makes it memorable for kids. Really want to do this this year (I'll be a first year teacher). Did every student have the pages with the 9 sheets or did they work together as a group on all nine surgeries? So fun!!

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- Amber Ernst on December 9, 2019 at 6:18 pm
  
  They worked as a group. If there was an individual skill I was assessing for a student I made sure to look for it.
  
  Reply
Lori M on June 24, 2016 at 3:03 pm

Wow! This looks AMAZING!!! Thank you so much for sharing!!

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Unknown on January 28, 2017 at 5:56 pm

Amber,
My colleague and I set this up for our 5th graders at Hambright Elementary School. They LOVED it. They said they didn't know grammar could be so fun! Thank you for the idea and inspiration. Are you on Twitter? I'd love to give you credit in my tweet.
Beth Martin

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Rochelle Rasheed on April 9, 2018 at 10:36 pm

What did you use for the brain surgery and the left hand surgery?

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Unknown on October 24, 2018 at 1:30 pm

Where can I find all of these resources?!

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