Adjectives and similes

I have been so overwhelmed lately with all the requirements I am suppose to teach. From the Harcourt series, the school-side goals, holiday and seasonal topics. My goodness February makes me so stressed. I am trying to balance all areas and it's becoming a choose one for one day and choose something different for the next day. That is fine and dandy, but the follow through is too late, they are expected to remember too much, so the recall is lost. I am still figuring out my solution. Any ideas on how you balance the piles that we are expected to teach daily? On a different side, I have been teaching adjectives for about two weeks. Last week we did the lesson demonstrating the importance of details in writing. I gave brief sentences and clues to make a house scene similar to the one I had created earlier. Of course the students didn't get to see my picture. The whole time they kept asking the same kinds of questions: how big?, where at?, what color? It was awesome when I had them flip over their papers and create a new picture with stronger and more descriptive details. I had hoped it would work out, but was shocked when I saw that most of the students' pictures looked just like mine. They seemed to understood the point of details.

Last night I was walking my dog and POOF came some more hands on ideas to really drive adjectives in. Today I wrote tons of different adjectives on papers around the room. I had the students find a card and bring it back to their seats. They had to write a "second grade" sentence using their adjective. We did this for three rounds and then they shared their sentences. To make it even better, we did similes this week and so many kids used similes in their sentences. They were such awesome sentences!