Fun with Idioms

We are listening to a wonderful story each morning as part of our author study: Missing May by Cynthia Rylant. This story has a fair number of idioms, and sometimes my students make the age-appropriate mistake of taking a saying literally. For instance, in this story there is a point when something was true because "it came from the horse's mouth". Later on, as we were discussing the passage, I asked who told our hero something. A student replied, "Well, it was a horse - I remember there was a horse in the story and it must have told the girl the truth." Puzzled, I found the section and then...we got into idioms. A teachable moment, for sure!

I listed a bunch of idioms on the board this morning, and we talked about the figurative v.s. the literal meaning. Each child was assigned one idiom to illustrate - in the literal sense. Then we challenged the rest of the school to figure out a common idiom we pictured - can you?