It’s no secret that I LOVE using mentor texts in my reading and writing block, and every once in a while, a picture book lesson comes together so well that I immediately know I’ll do it again. This alliteration activity, which uses one VERY impressive book, was one of those lessons! Not only does it cover figurative language and alliteration, but it’s also perfect for your writing AND grammar block.

The Lesson: We began by reading Once Upon an Alphabet (affiliate link) by Oliver Jeffers, which features a collection of short, quirky stories for every letter of the alphabet. Rather than reading the whole book at once, we stretched it out over several days and read just a few letters each day. My students loved seeing what completely unexpected direction each new letter would take us. The engagement while reading this book was off the charts!

After we finished reading, students got to work on the alliteration activity! The assignment was that each student would create an alliterative story of their own, each with a different letter! Scroll to learn more and grab your FREE planning guide!

Brainstorming for Alliteration Activity

Each student started by choosing (or being assigned) a letter. Before they began writing, they completed an Alliteration Avalanche brainstorm. The goal was to think of as many words as possible that begin with their letter, but I wanted their brainstorming to have some structure and a clearer academic purpose. Students came up with words in several different categories:

• adjectives
• verbs
• nouns
• character traits
• settings
• exclamations
• onomatopoeia

This ended up being SUCH a good review of parts of speech without feeling like a parts-of-speech lesson. It also gave students a huge bank of words to pull from once they started writing their actual story.

Creating FUN Alliterative Stories

Once students had plenty of words to work with, the challenge was to turn those words into an actual mini story, just like in the book. This is what makes this alliteration activity SO much fun!

And this is also where the activity became so much more than simply writing a silly sentence filled with words that start with the same letter.

Students had to think about characters, setting, action, sentence structure, word choice, and story sequence while also maintaining as much alliteration as possible. They quickly discovered that cramming a bunch of same-letter words into a sentence is easy. Making those words tell a story that actually makes sense takes quite a bit more thinking!

We had some wonderfully ridiculous stories by the end. My Titanic example for the letter T included Tiny Tim the Turtle traveling to Timbuktu to tell the tragic tale of the Titanic.

The BEST Alliteration Practice Activity!

I originally created this as an enrichment activity, but there are so many ways you could use it. It works beautifully when teaching alliteration, parts of speech, word choice, sentence structure, or story elements. It would also make a great early finisher activity or literacy center.

Best of all, my students genuinely had fun with it. Their finished alphabet stories also made the CUTEST classroom display. I have also made them into BOOKS when I have students complete the entire alphabet.

And this alliteration activity is completely FREE! You can grab the printable brainstorming and writing pages and try it with your own students.

🔗 Don’t forget to grab the book, too!

Looking for even more picture book lessons? I have SO many!

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