Expanding Vocabulary Daily

Through all of the reading and writing that goes on each and every day, students are always expanding their vocabulary.  In addition, here are a few of the resources students have right at their fingertips, and some of the activities we use to encourage and practice the learning of new words!

Our Word Wall continues to grow each week.  Students are expected to use this as a resource when reading and writing.

These "Popcorn" words are those words that "pop" up frequently in our writing, but are not yet Word Wall Words.  This bulletin board is another resource in our classroom that students are welcome to use when writing.  

In addition to the above resources, every student has their own personal copy of a "Children's Dictionary" in their desk to use, as well as, an "ABC" booklet containing a list of all of this year's Word Wall Words.   We practice using our dictionaries often just to make sure we don't forget about this valuable resource.  

Having a variety of resources available eliminates a lot of the "Can you help me spell . . .?" requests from students.  We want the boys and girls to become more independent when working. A large part of this is enabling them to know where resources are located, how to use them, and when it is appropriate to use them. 

 Another activity we do is to brainstorm and look for new "exciting" words to take the place of older "tired" words.  We discuss the shades of meaning in the new words as we add them to an anchor chart that is displayed in the room.  Eventually, this chart will be reduced to a notebook size that can be added to each student's writing folder.  This folder is full of reference pages to use during writing.

  

Poetry is such a fun way to introduce new vocabulary.  The boys and girls look forward to our poetry time each day and remind me if I forget!  

As we learn about new topics through math, science, and social studies, we also add new vocabulary words to our ever-expanding list.

As shown in a previous post, our math and language arts vocabulary terms are posted in the room as a visual reminder.  Below, students get "hands-on" practice to create a concrete model to help them further understand those concepts and terms.  (Ex. compare, bigger, longer, smaller, shorter, greater, less than, measure)  The kiddos are to use these terms whenever we talk about math, write about math, or play math games.  

Here students are using connecting cubes to compare lengths.  They have to be able to read and understand the terms on the recording sheet as they write in their results.






























These are just a few of the activities and resources we use to "Expand Vocabulary" each and every day in our classroom! Watch for more as our year progresses!

Our First Full Week of School

It was so good to begin a regular full-day schedule last week.  We are beginning to learn our schedule and work on stamina for reading and writing.  

We are well into our sight word or word wall word practice now.  One activity we did to practice the sight word "as" was to write similes comparing an animal to some other inanimate object.

Before doing any writing, we read the book "Easy as Pie" and discussed the many sayings that were new to the boys and girls.  Then, everyone picked an animal and let their creative "juices" flow!  Here are some examples:

"The dog is (as) brown as the dirt.:

"The cheetah can run as fast as a car."

"The zebra is as striped as a candy cane."

"The snake is green as grass."

 

In writing, we have been working hard to include at least one adjective in our sentences. We also talked about "stretching" out unknown words and underlining those we aren't sure how to spell.  By doing this students can just keep writing down their thoughts without getting hung-up on the spelling.  Of course, it is an expectation that word wall or sight words be spelled correctly if we have introduced them in class.

In math we have been practicing reading or interpreting data, creating graphs, and discussing the graphs.  We use specific math vocabulary words as seen above during writing and discussions.

As a formulative assessment, the boys and girls worked with a partner to sort, graph, interpret, and discuss a baggie of colored 1" wooden cubes.  They then had to formulate a question and write an answer.

We also play many math games during the week to practice counting.  The game pictured below is called "Ordering Numbers."  Students rolled dice and wrote the numbers in order.  To differentiate we used 6, 10, and 12-sided dice and a number line if needed.

To serve as a remembrance for 9-11, a group of Monmouth College students visited our school.  They read a book tittled "America the Beautiful," had the students listen to the song via CD, and had the boys and girls join in for a verse of the song.

We've had a busy last couple of weeks! The boys and girls have been hard workers in spite of the hot weather!