Festivals, Food, Fun: Welcome to Our Place! – the GiggleIT Project

The GiggleIT Spotlight Theme " Festivals, Food, Fun: Welcome to Our Place!" celebrates all the food and fun that friends enjoy at local fairs and festivals through two projects that focus on your students’ personal experiences:

• Yummy Poems about fabulous festival food with friends, and
• A Letter to Faraway Friends inviting them to experience what a local festival or fair has to offer.

Feel free to copy and share the Instructions to Students shown for each Project or put them into your own words.

• GiggleIT encourages students to write in small groups, but they may also write individually or as an entire class.
• Original illustrations and personal photos are great additions to these Spotlight Projects
• Please be sure that students only use their initials to sign their work, for personal safety!

If culture-specific words are included, students should provide a glossary so that all readers will understand their writing better, as shown in the poem example for students below.

Yummy Poems – Spotlight Project

For many people, the best thing about any festival, fair, celebration, or party is the food! Your students can introduce their favorites to readers all over the world, using poetry.

You’ll find several poetry types in the Genre Samples section of GiggleIT Resources page, including Acrostic, Free Verse, Limerick, and Shape poems. Haiku is also popular, and a rhyming poem is given as an example in the Instructions to Students.

Help your students find just the right word or rhythm for their Yummy Poems, and remind them to make a Glossary of words that might be unfamiliar to readers elsewhere. Foods which are well-known to your students are exotic and unusual to someone else.

Yummy Poems - Instructions to Students: 

Begin your Yummy Poem by brainstorming about the festivals, fairs, and celebrations in your area that you’ve attended.  This should be a very fun list to make! Write then names of special foods next to each festival (even if you don’t like all the foods). This is a good time to make sure that your lists are accurate by researching in your library.

Next, decide which special food you will write about. Make a list of words that describe it – taste, color, smell, shape, how it sounds when you eat it.

Then, look at different poetry forms to see which will work best for your Yummy Poem. You might try haiku, acrostic, free verse, limerick, or rhyming poem.

Write your Yummy Poem – by yourself or with friends - and read it aloud to make sure you have the right words in the right spots.  Ask your teacher or librarian to proofread your poem (good writers edit their work more than once). Remember to include a glossary, defining words that readers in other places might find unusual, confusing or strange.

Finally, sign your Yummy Poem with your initials so it can be published and enjoyed by family and friends!

Twirling, whirling,

Sweet and light,

Sugar spins as light as air!

Pink or purple,

Green or blue,

Cotton candy* at the fair!

**KMM

Letter to Faraway Friends – Spotlight Project

Your students can use their talents for description and persuasion to write a letter to others as an invitation to visit your town for a festival or fair and join in the fun.

Persuasive writing is included in the curriculum for many grade levels, and the disappearing art of letter-writing can help your students practice this skill in an engaging way.

Letter-writing may be unfamiliar to your students; this pen-pal episode of Arthur on PBSKids introduces letter-writing and why defining culturally specific words is important: https://pbskids.org/arthur/friends/dear-adil

Who can your students write to? Ask colleagues in other towns and on social media for pen-pal class connections, reputable publications that accept student works, and how to submit letters to their local newspapers.

Models of informal letters can be found in student writing handbooks, style guides, and these websites:

• An Introduction to Letter Writing, by My Child magazine (UK) at Reading Rockets - http://www.readingrockets.org/article/introduction-letter-writing
• How to Write Great Letters, by the literacyideas.com team of educators and writing professionals - https://www.literacyideas.com/how-to-write-a-great-letter/

Many students will select the same festival, fair, or event, so they can write their Letter to Faraway Friends as a team. This exercise is a good introduction to working together in groups, especially if you coach your writers so that one student doesn’t do all the work or keep others from contributing.

As you see in the Instructions to Students, this Letter to Faraway Friends will include several components:

• a heading (the date),
• a greeting (Dear Friends),
• a paragraph introducing their favorite local event,
• two or three paragraphs discussing specific things that the reader would like about the festival (one per paragraph) and why they’d enjoy that,
• a final paragraph that invites the reader to attend the festival (include the month or usual time it occurs here or in the introduction),
• a friendly closing,
• and the students’ initials as their signature.

Encourage your students to use varied adjectives and exciting verbs as they write. “The fair barn is dusty tan outside, but inside are the most beautiful horses from the whole county” is more appealing than “I like to see the horses at the fair,” especially if the letter is being written to persuade someone to come to your place.

Ask your writing teams to read their letters aloud to one another; the listeners should note any repetitions or sentences that might benefit from changes, but it’s up to the writers to make those changes if they wish.

An editing session with each writing team allows you to make sure that they have all the letter’s elements and that it is ready for you to send to its designated recipients.

Letter to Faraway Friends - Instructions to Students: 

The only thing better than going to a festival is being there with friends. Imagine your favorite local festival, fair, or event – what can you see there that you don’t see anywhere else? Which activity do you most look forward to? What do you hear?

Now, you can invite someone else to enjoy this too, when you write a Letter to Faraway Friends using great descriptions and strong reasons that they should come to your place for all the fun.

Your teacher/librarian will help you learn the parts of a friendly letter – the heading, greeting, body, closing, and signature (please use your initials here).

To begin, think of several fun things to do, see, hear, touch, and taste at your chosen event, then choose 2-3 of the ones that someone your age might like best.

Now list some descriptive words for each thing – a variety of word choices is more interesting than repeating “It’s fun” as the reason that the reader of your letter should come to the event with you.

This informal letter will probably have one paragraph that introduces your event, a paragraph for each fun thing and reason why it is worth doing/seeing, and a final paragraph that wraps up your invitation to the event (total of 4-5 paragraphs). Use a friendly closing, then sign your letter with the initials of everyone on your writing team.

Your writing team can read your letter aloud to others in your class to see if it makes them excited to attend the festival or fair. They might suggest other words to use or might hear repetitions that you didn’t notice. Proofreading one another’s work is a good practice for writers, as many authors will tell you.

Because you’re talking about things that might be unfamiliar to your readers somewhere, you may need to include a glossary defining regional and unusual words. Make your glossary the postscript (p.s.) at the end of your letter, beneath your initials. Ask your teacher/librarian if your glossary covers all these words during your editing time together.

When your letter-writing team is happy with your Letter to Faraway Friends, ask your teacher/librarian to send it by post or email.

**KMM poem by GiggleIT Project team member Katy Manck, MLS.

Cotton candy photo from morguefile.com http://mrg.bz/9Px2zK.

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