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  A well-planned word wall allows students to quickly access familiar high frequency words from word study instruction. As they are writing, they can simply glance up, find the word, and continue to write. With… Continue reading →

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A short and sweet reminder, from a student point-of-view.

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Elizabeth Siracusa, a fourth- and fifth-grade looping teacher, reflects on the ways she infused vocabulary instruction into her classroom this year.

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Sometimes colleagues tell me that the feel intimidated or uneasy about setting out to teach phonemic awareness, because it all feels so technical. Even the terminology is tricky: phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonics... I like to think of teaching phonemic awareness as being just like kindergarteners themselves--complicated indeed, but also a lot of fun.

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Last summer, Take Away the A by Michael Escoffier was my fun new Word Study book for the year. I wasn't the only one who got jazzed up by it. I handed it off to Carol Wilcox when I arrived at the Denver airport so she could use it in PD and then mail it back to me.

Here's this year's fun new Word Study book by Michael Escoffier:

Where's the Baboon?
by Michael Escoffier
illustrated by Kris Di Giacomo
Enchanted Lion Books, October 2015
review copy provided by the publisher

The entire text of this book is pretty much a series of questions. You can answer the question by looking at the letters in red, or by studying the illustrations. In the first spread, the mice let us know we are heading to school to search for hidden words. Our first question is, "Who is the headmaster? (You guessed it -- hamster!)

It's amazing how much the reader learns about the animals and their school just through a series of questions. And I probably shouldn't have been as surprised as I was by the ending. (Hint -- the plot line is circular, and the title is a part of the story. Also, someone is having a birthday...)

This book will have readers and word-lovers looking for words-inside-words and writing stories consisting of questions.

Fun times in Word Study!

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Have you ever been in the midst of your writing and you have to stop in order to find the perfect word?

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Take Away the A
by Michaël Escoffier (author of Brief Thief, Me First! and The Day I Lost My Superpowers)
You will want this book. I guarantee it.

Best. Alphabet Book. Ever.

This is the kind of mentor text that makes you want to try writing this way...right NOW.

Here's a taste:

"Without the A
the BEAST is BEST.

Without the B
the BRIDE goes for a RIDE.

Without the C
the CHAIR has HAIR."

See what I mean?

I wish you could actually see the book, because the other part of the fun is finding the duck, the mice, the octopus, the monkey, and the cats in spreads other than their own throughout the book.

Need a quote for a slide in your word study/vocabulary presentation? From the press release:

"Since we are really only able to think about the world, ourselves, and the nature of life itself (along with everything else) within the vocabulary that is available to us, the richer and more nuanced our language is, the richer our possibilities for thinking and understanding become. From this point of view, the ethical, political, cultural and intellectual imperatives for deepening a child's sense of language and its possibilities are profound. Giving them the idea that language is a vital material with which they can make and build and shape their world is so clearly of vital importance."

What are you waiting for?

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She's chanting to the choir with both of these books, but a quick peek at my counter and refrigerator will show that I don't need ANY convincing on the subject of fruit! (How on earth am I going to eat a pint of blueberries, 2 mangoes, a pineapple and a bag of bing cherries before I leave on Friday?!?!)

As with Rah, Rah, Radishes!, Go, Go, Grapes! features vivid photos from farmer's markets and groceries around Ohio and Indiana, along with some guest appearances from a Vietnamese farmer's market in New Orleans for some of the most exotic fruits.

Word study? Check out these JUICY words!

Science? Use this book with your plant unit!

Writing workshop? Go gather up a collection of words on a topic and try writing your own chant!

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We notice words and talk about words (and, of course, "use our words") all day every day. But on Wednesday, we set aside our regular writing workshop for...Wooorrrrrrddddd Wednesday!

Sometimes we do activities like Syllable Squats and Nym Gyms from Vocabulary Unplugged. (Some sample pages here, website here.)

We have made Word Family Webs on chart paper (act: acts, acted, action, actor, activate, etc.) and then we used Evernote on the iPod Touches to create a class collection of word families. (Thank you Maria and Mark! In fact, thank you, Maria, for the whole concept of Word Wednesday!)

Sometimes we work on Spelling City. I have gathered lots of lists of words (from -at and -ing words to Velma's words in The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis...this would be an example of real-world differentiation) and on Spelling City, students can pretest, play games, write sentences and posttest.

I've written about how I use the SmartBoard and my classroom mirror for word study. Recently, I took a bunch of juicy words (from one of the Thea Stilton books) off the mirror and put them on the SmartBoard. We practiced finding the root word and the affixes, and the Thea reader stood a few inches taller because HER juicy words helped us learn.

We have lots of favorite word games to play on the iPod Touches on Word Wednesday. (You might guess that this is a favorite activity for Word Wednesday!) We like Wurdle, Chicktionary, and Bookworm. Soon we'll have Words With Friends (a current obsession of mine). We'll use the "Pass and Play" feature.

What are your favorite ways to celebrate words, collect words, play with words, and learn words -- on your own, or with your students?

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This was an unsolicited-by-me blog post on one of my students' blogs...on our snow day Friday!!

Huzzah!

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The Odious Ogre
by Norton Juster
illustrated by Jules Pfeiffer
Scholastic, 2010
review copy provided by the publisher

This is the story of an ogre so awful that the villagers cower in terror underneath tables when the ogre is afoot. This ogre is confident that he's "Absolutely invincible!"

Then he meets a sweet girl who, even though she recognizes his flaws, insists that he's not so terrible. "Overbearing perhaps, arrogant for sure, somewhat self-important, a little too mean and violent, I'm afraid, and a bit messy. Your shoes could certainly use a polishing, but I'll bet if you brushed your teeth combed your hair, found some new clothes, and totally changed your attitude you'd be quite nice."

You might be able to guess that the sweet girl overcomes the odious ogre. The way she does it is a good reminder that huge and unmanageable problems can be brought to their knees without anything more than continuing on the path one knows to be the right one. (Self, are you listening?)

This is a great book for your word study stack. The ogre has a fabulous vocabulary, due to swallowing a dictionary on one pillage or another.


The Odious Ogre by Norton Juster, Illustrated by Jules Feiffer from Expanded Books on Vimeo.

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Locust, or cicada, is chicharra in Spanish. I know this because as we were looking at the shells and corpses of cicadas that one of my girls brought in (you go, GIRL!), one of my Spanish-speakers walked up and said with an authority that he does not have yet in English, "Chicharra." We all tried to roll our r's as well as he did and the more we said chicharra, the more we sounded like a bunch of cicadas in the trees. Say it! See what I mean?!?

I love that my students are bringing their passions to school already in the third week, and I love that we are adding first-language words to our "juicy" words we're collecting. When the one-third of my class who were gone for Eid on Friday return this week, we'll see if there are words from their language and their celebration that we can add to our list and learn.

Here's where we collect our "juicy" words:


This is the best solution for covering our classroom's mirror that I've ever come up with -- "Reflect on These JUICY Words." The classroom assistant has a pad of sticky notes, and whenever anyone come across a "juicy" word in the book they're reading or I'm reading aloud, in class discussion, overheard in a conversation, etc., they help the assistant put it on a note and post it on the mirror.

Every so often, I type the newest juicy words onto a blank page in the SmartBoard software. This is our electronic Word Wall! I've made each of the words on the word wall a piece of movable text so that we can sort the words, looking for similarities and differences, categories, parts of speech, prefixes, suffixes, etc.

Soon we'll need to make a second page, we've collected so many words. I can't wait to see how this Word Wall project develops. Out of all the ways I've tried to integrate my new SmartBoard into my teaching, this is my favorite so far.

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I recall hearing about differentiated spelling words, for students in Word Study, the first time I visited the school I taught at in Rhode Island.  I was unsure of how it would be possible to differentiate for students.  Once I began teaching fourth grade in Rhode Island, I quickly learned the easiest way to find [...]

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I tend not to focus much on spelling when I write about the teaching of writing. However, I’m well-aware that using conventions properly is extremely important. Each week, my students have eight personal words, which are drawn from their own writing and/or high-frequency words they misspell on assessments I give. [These are in addition [...]

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