Wednesday Word Work Reflection

My first week of lessons plans for word study were blown out of the water the first day of school.  When I begin each workshop with inquiry,  I should know better. After 31 years of teaching, you would think I would no not to plan a week out. 

I found a new book (to me) this summer Word Builder  Once I read it, I knew it would be included in my Day 1 plans: sharing a great book and an open sort of vocabulary.  The power in an open word sort is that I learn along with my learners.  The conversations were huge!!  Actually so big I changed Thursday's plans.  We were already to discuss word observations once I lifted their thinking from the chart above.

I was so excited I sent an email to our staff sharing photos and the new book title.  So many times in education, we forget to thank the teachers below us.  I like to call it the Food Chain - growth of knowledge leading to the top level - fifth grade.  I was ecstatic when five other teachers borrowed the book and my lesson.  YES!  The power of collaboration.  We're off to an amazing start in Room 234.  Shifting their thinking already about words!!

Wednesday Word Work: Mapping the Course

With anything we teach routines are crucial for students and teachers. In our district, we have Grade Level Progressions to follow, and I am thankful for that map which helps me plan the lessons. In addition we are required to do 10-15 minutes word work a day; however, I always go over this time because I am weaving the skills into so many different content areas. 

Building excitement with words - teaching my students that words are everywhere!

Routines are established around three important principles to develop and encourage strong wordsmiths in my classroom.

1. exploration
2.  practice
3. connections
4. assessments

Exploration is my favorite part of word study. Nothing is better than when students are looking, thinking and working with new words. Several years ago I read Max Brand's book Word Savvy and it changed my word work teaching instantly. Here is the link to that post. After the students spend the first week discussing their names and practicing with them, we stretch our word learning to outside the classroom. See photo above. Our first month of word work is focused on the following:

• assessing our students through a spelling and sentence dictation
• word observations
• word connections
• word webs
• word sorts

My goal is to encourage students to think differently about word work. One way I incorporate fun with words is collecting greeting cards all year. It's fun each month to pull out new cards and share them with the students eventually my students start to bring me their "fun" with words ideas. Here are some past blog posts about building fun in word work. 

• Word play is crucial the first month of school.  
• Greeting Cards make word work fun.
• Word Observations (Have you tried stickers?)

Thanks for stopping by on Wonderful Wednesday I am excited to learn along with you as we explore word work.

Whose Chart is It Anyways?

Many times in my teaching career I have had the following experience.  I  am getting ready to teach the best planned lesson and as I begin a student asks a question that takes the opening conversation a totally different way. I believe that is being a reflective teacher.  Realizing that their questions are often the best guide for great lessons in our classroom.  But I had never thought about this idea when it comes to creating anchor charts.

However, after being in school for several weeks, I was getting ready to introduce Word Observations in Word Study.  I put the word "airplanes" on the board and asked my class what do you know about this word?  Molly said, "It has letters."  I replied yes and added it to our new anchor chart entitled:  Word Observations. There was a long pause and finally Ana said, "It is a compound word." and I added it to the chart.  Again there was a pause (seemed like forever) and Joe said, "It has vowels" I decided to push a little bit more, and we ended up with words are made of vowels and consonants.  This is where the conversation ended.  This is not the anchor chart that I thought we would have at the end of a 30 minute lesson, but this is where the class was so we stopped and headed to specials.

The next day we continued with a different word  "surprised" and the conversation started with the same thinking, but Howard added "This word ends in "ed" so it must be a verb."  Light bulb moments (part of speech and prefixes) all rolled into one comment.  We added those two ideas to our anchor chart and went back to "airplanes" to add plural noun.  

This pattern continued for 3 periods of 30 minutes each.  It took everything I had just not to tell them what I wanted on our anchor chart, but I knew it was their anchor chart.  This was huge for me because how many times do we predetermine the anchor chart and just push right through the lesson to get to what we want on it.  These lessons took much longer than I planned, but now the students own  the word observation anchor chart and BEST of all they now know how to observe a word also.