Creative Writing Ornaments

This lesson's focus is about how to write very detailed descriptions.  The process:
1) students are given a photocopy of a large circle on white paper, the rest is blank
2) criteria for step one: decorate your ornament using only shapes and patterns (no drawings/words) must have at least 3 colours used and no white showing, do not put name on it
3)write a very detailed description of your ornament.  I have modelled examples of detailed vs not by saying "a girl in class, who is it" not enough info so add details, brown hair, glasses, wearing a red shirt, etc and they easily guess who it is
4) hand in the two papers that you have been keeping hidden from prying eyes while creating
5) number all the ornaments with large felt from 1-27 in this case for number of students participating and display them clearly on the front board
They have been mixed up at this point and no one knows who each ornament belongs to.
6) hand back written descriptions to the owners and have them list the numbers 1-27 in the margin on the back
7) each student takes a turn reading out their description and the rest of the class attempts to figure out which ornament is theirs and write that person's name beside the corresponding number.  The goal was to write your description in a way that it would be easy to guess because it was so detailed and clear!  Read each description twice giving think time between
The students show they can be amazing attentive listeners during this activity.  It is a "contest" to see who can match the most ornaments correctly from the descriptions.  I awarded little prizes at the end.
8)exchange guess papers and reveal time!  Go through each ornamnet and find out who it belongs to, students mark, total it up and you have a winner!  24 correct in this case.
I asked the students for their thoughts about the activity, some of the comments were: they definitely enjoyed it, thought it was fun, they were engaged throughout.  Creating first helped them get more details down when it was time to write, hearing all the descriptions helped them decide what kind of details were important and different ideas for how to write them if they were to do something like this again, helped make a picture in my mind.  Frustrating when peers presented not enough information or not clear lacking detail.
Think I need to do a similar activity for a follow up to see if their descriptive writing improves further now that they've had this experience.

Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Government?

To help students prepare for an assessment on the services the 3 levels of government provide students worked together in groups of 3 to write songs to the tune of "Head and shoulders, knees, and toes..." only with one level of governement as the focus.  E.G. Fireman, police, and library...municipal, municipal, etc.  They needed to include actions for everything in their songs (pretty funny, especially sewer and water actions!).  They did a great job on these, had a lot of fun with it.  Engagement was high, presentations had accurate information and enthusiastic participants!  This was after doing a tableau activity where they had to demonstrate a government service in their group for the class.  Again they did very well with the activity.

So did these fun engaging activities help them learn the content?  The assessment was a cut and paste quiz where they were given 20 different government services to cut up on one sheet of paper and a 3 column (sp?) chart on another paper, they had to glue the service in the correct level of govt collumn.  I spoke with the class after the assessment about what they thought of the cut and paste quiz format.  The responses was unanimously positive. 
Some of the things they said were: didn't have to but all my energy into remembering the big list, could think about where it belonged, didn't have to do a lot of writing, makes my hand hurt, don't like to write that much (which might lead to reluctance to complete and maybe not a true assessment of what they know).  Could move them around in my hands before gluing to think about where they went, change my mind. 
These comments make me think that we probably got a more accurate measurement of what the students actually knew by removing the writing/memory barriers and increasing the tactile methods for some of our students who respond better to this learning style.
Overall the marks were good.  A few students were not very successful, they were students who often have difficulty academically.  So now to figure out why?  Is it a reading barrier?  This is my suspicion, when these students see a fair bit of text they need to extract meaning from they often "shut down" as they struggle with their reading.  So I think I will re-test them orally to find out if their knowledge is better represented if  it is read to them first one item at a time then they decide which level of governemnt the service described belongs in.