Pop, Poppity, Pop

I love those lessons that just...work. There's no real reason why but everything about them is balanced and fun.
This year I took over Literacy planning for my team. Although this is a big task, it's not as bad as it sounds. We do not re-create the wheel each year, but re-use last year's lessons and edit as we feel we need to. As such, my job is pretty easy. I just add in some flare here and there (usually thanks to Pinterest inspiration).
However I find that I am often torn between the creative craftivities that I see all over the US-based teaching blogs (and love so much) and my UK-based training. I want my lessons to be interactive, creative, tactile and fun, but this doesn't always produce a lot of concrete evidence in my student's workbooks. In the long run, this poses a problem when our workbooks are being scrutinized and there is not work for each day written down. Of course, I could photograph, print, cut, glue in and mark each activity that we do but that just. isn't. practical. To sum up, it's hard to strike a balance between what I want to do and what I have to do.
My little ones' learning is the most important part and here is a summary of a lesson that I think worked for everyone.
The Literacy unit we were studying was Playscripts. This lesson worked because it was a script about a popcorn salesman. The main Learning Objective was to read and understand a script (which children would eventually be writing on their own) and to also use their 5 senses to describe (in this case, popcorn).
Firstly, we read the Reader's Theatre script "Pop, Poppity, Pop" off of the Super Teacher website. You need a subscription to view and download all of the worksheets off of this website, and I highly recommend it. After that, we did a word shower (one of my favourite activities) using all of our senses. I got them started then sent them off to finish their own in their Literacy books. To help them along,  I handed out plastic cups full of popcorn so they could sniff, taste, feel and see the stuff. (As I'm writing this, I am realizing that I could also have microwaved it with them and we could have discussed the sound it made. Again, all of these fabulous things are not always possible to do.) Students then completed the comprehension questions on Pop, Poppity, Pop. All in all, I think this was a fun lesson that took a simple comprehension text and made it tactile and fun!