Wonderful Word Wednesday

Our class continues to have fun with exploring BIG words.  After starting the year with our Hallmark bulletin board, we have now moved towards adding BIG words to our writing.  Some of my favorite books to start the year include the following.

 Max's Words by Kate Banks This is a very powerful book showing the importance of words.  First it is a great book to talk about student's collections Ie: baseball cards, etc. The idea that Max loves to collect words is wonderful. I enjoy it because the way the book builds from words, to sentences, to paragraphs. I also love how Max uses everyday items like a newspaper to collect his favorite words. My class starts their word study spiral with this idea, and the students go home and collect words and glue them on their first page of the spiral. They often refer back to this page in their own writing.

I also share Big Words For Little People by Jamie Lee Curtis with my class. I hesitate to share books written by actors however this book has been a huge jumping off point for my class. As I read aloud the book to my class, I have the students listen and collect the BIG words in their word study spiral.The students enjoy sharing the new words and then we connect these words to our figurative language simile bulletin board.  The students begin to use these words in their writing and that is my goal for any word work.

Finally I collect many books about words and keep then in a basket on one of my favorite spots in my classroom. I love how a round tables brings the students together as well as taking the legs off the table seemed to make it a perfect height for conversations.  I often observe students pulling out the word books and looking through them for fun as well as searching for new words for their own writing. I have to say my favorite day of the week is WONDERFUL WORD WEDNESDAY!