Onomatopoeia Free Writing Time with Kids

We did an onomatopoeia free write.

If kids are exposed to nursery rhymes and songs they learn onomatopoeia from birth.

This little pig went to market,
This little pig stayed home,
This little pig had roast beef,
This little pig had none,
And this little piggy cried wee-wee-wee all the way home

Last week we did an onomatopoeia poetry lesson and this week we continued with the theme by doing an onomatopoeia free write. - Brave Writer has so many great ideas!

First we searched for more poems which included onomatopoeia and they weren't difficult to find. There are several concerning rain such as The Umbrella Brigade by Laura E Richards and Drums of the Rain by Mary Carolyn Davies.

The sounds in Galoshes by Rhoda W. Bacmeister transports the reader to a late winter day.

Susie's galoshes
Make splishes and sploshes
And slooshes and sloshes,
As Susie steps slowly
Along in the slush.

They stamp and they tramp
On the ice and concrete,
They get stuck in the muck and the mud;
But Susie likes much best to hear

The slippery slush
As it slooshes and sloshes,
And splishes and sploshes,
All round her galoshes!

Onomatopoeia comes is stories too. Ty's One-Man Band by Mildred Pitts Walter begins with a step-th-hump, step-th-hump, step-th-hump as a musical man walks into the fields. He turns out to have a wooden leg and a great talent for making music with spoons, washboards and combs.

The kids took special note of the puffa-puffa-stick-stick of Jan Brett's hedgehog in Hedgie's Surprise.

After the stories we went outside and began listening and writing.

The goal of this activity was simply to write down sounds we heard. By practicing writing this way, writing descriptions of sound should pop into stories much more naturally.

Here are some of the results:

From my 10 year old son
Tweet, tweet - a bird
"I want to be alone here."
crash - a something
rrrrrr - a plane
shhhhhhh - a car
cock-a-doodle-doo - a rooster
whooshhhhh - the wind
quack, quack - a duck
woof, woof - a dog
growl - a dog
ttttttttt - a hammer
wewuuuuuuuu - construction
tssss-ssss-ssss - a broom

A portion of my free write - I think it's important to work along side the kids as it both helps my writing and encourages them by example.

The rumbling airplane drowns the tweeting of birds. Some say chirp-ch-ch chirp and others chir-ip, chir-ip and ch rrr rrr rrrp. The geese gobble, gobble honking across the creek. One noisy one is busy repeating his song as the construction worker chuckles. An excited fowl g-g-g-gobbles in answer to the repeating honker.

An occasional car swishes by and the ki-ki-re-key of the German rooster sounds again and again. Spring is in the air as the old man across the street sweeps the sidewalk and people walking past wave "hello". A duck quacks and the excited frog croaks rib-rib rib-rib. Woof, woof, oooohhhh sounds the dog wanting to get out.



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