Teaching Onomatopoeia for Openers and Expression

A great activity for teaching onomatopoeia and creating a fun Openers resource.

Start by brainstorming as many sounds as you can in small groups – for example, sizzle, pop, crash, hiss.

Collate them as a class to remove as many repeats as possible. Then assign a few sounds to each group so you have a good variety being created.

Then the next part is optional, but we headed over to https://www.graffiti-empire.com/graffiti-generator/ to use their free online generator to help spark some creative ideas.

As I wanted to turn this into a classroom resource when the students were finished, they created their artwork on A5 cardstock. However, I have seen art projects where they made a fence out of craft sticks and then transferred their artwork to their mini fences. I used the project as a reward, and any time work was finished early or the class earned a brain break, they could work on their cardstock. When they were finished, I scanned the cards, printed and laminated them, and we started using them as an opener resource: flip over a card and use it to create an opener plus one. The onomatopoeia could be a single-word sentence, but then it needed to be followed up with another sentence to put it into context.

Bang! The door quickly slammed shut behind John as he raced to find Pete, desperate to tell him the news.

Check out some of the examples below for more artistic options besides street art.