The Doctors Are In!

Second graders are tons of fun to teach! They still have an imagination but also have enough background knowledge to fuel an activity. It has been a while since I taught contractions, but I remember doing an activity that was fun with my class years ago in second grade. (Plus, I had a refresher when I viewed this on Pinterest.) However, I do not recall going to the extent as I did this year. We had a BLAST!!

When I need my students' attention, one of the commands I say is "Doctor's hands!" and they carefully drop everything and put their hands up, like a surgeon with clean hands. So, my students were all working in their Daily 5 activities. All was calm. Usually I shake a tiny maraca to get them to clean up and meet me for a mini-lesson. Instead, I stated "DOCTOR'S HANDS!" and they cleaned up super fast and met me on the floor. I was waiting for them with a face mask on and wearing gloves. I instructed them "Doctors, quickly! Form a circle! This is an URGENT matter!" and they giggled to the floor in a circle. I told them there are many words in need of some surgery. In order for them to make it, we will need to form them into contractions. We quickly reviewed contractions - "Doctors, what IS a contraction?" and I listed some on the easel. (We had studied a bit the day before, plus we watched Brain Pop Jr. and took notes) I had many words written on sentence strips, such as 'he  is', etc. I modeled it first. "Nurse! Nurse!" I said to the boy sitting next to me "Nurse, I need the scalpel. Scalpel!" and whispered "Put the scissors in my hand." and they giggled. I told the sentence strip "This won't hurt a bit." and cut the 'he  is' in half, cut off the i, and reassured my 'patient' "This is almost over." and stuck the 'he s' together with a band-aid, which represented the apostrophe. "Good as new!" and held it up. They were pumped! "I want to do surgery!" they said. 
So, I passed out supplies:

And after a quick picture, I gave each doctor a 'patient' and sent them to the OR (their tables). They were so serious, cutting and repairing the words: 

Once the patients were 'out of surgery', they went to the 'recovery room' (or tiny table, as it is known for being tiny - had the legs removed so they can sit on the floor and work) As the doctors completed surgery at their own pace, they moved on to more surgery with words of their choice - from the chart or from their notes they took while watching Brain Pop Jr. 

We had SO much fun! I kept several new contractions and displayed them on the wall. When we have our spelling rule for contractions, it will be fun to refer back to the day we all performed word surgery in class!