Are you playing Wordle? This game was created by Josh Wardle for his crossword-loving partner. I’m obsessed! It’s the best digit game to come out since this type of entertainment became popular. It demands strategic thinking as you guess the word in six (or fewer) tries. You have to utilize your knowledge of how words work. There’s no way to binge the game, as there is only one posted game per day. It is just enough to help you exercise the gray matter and then move on. Best of all, when you guess the word you have a reason to celebrate. We need more celebration in our life!
As an educator, I always try to evaluate game based on how they can benefit students. Games are a tool for building fluency. Fluency is defined as automaticity and/or controlled processing. When first learning a skill, our brains must make sense of the skill. When should I use the skill? What are the steps of this skill? The more feedback we get as we learn the skill, the quicker our efforts can improve. This feedback is really just good coaching!
By Randi Anderson
Summer is a great time to connect with your kids through playing games. Games are a brain changer! Jane McGonigal's book Reality is Broken, gives us insight into why games are powerful. She says that games are an escape from reality and challenges motivate us.
I recently dove into researching best-teaching practices for increasing student vocabulary. This is a topic I am asked to present on frequently, probably because it is one of the most complex areas to teach. This summer I read, Responsive Literacy by Editor, Patricia L. Scharer. Here are some of their ideas for helping students strengthen language comprehension.
As we are in the midst of MOY (Middle of the Year) screenings, we are seeing areas of growth and need on our classrooms. If your students are in need of grapho-phonemic skills, here is a quick game to use in your word work block.
A word cloud is an image composed of words or phrases. Individually or as a team, students create an image in which the size of each word or phrase indicates its importance to the overall meaning of the topic or text. Word clouds can be created for concepts, characters, events, and themes across content areas.
A few weeks ago, during a small group reading observation, I watched a group of five learning-disabled students struggle with key vocabulary in a reading passage. While the goal of the group was to develop comprehension, it was clear that these learners needed a strategy and practice for decoding new words. Here is an easy-to-implement strategy that can be used to warm-up for reading group.
What strategies do proficient readers use when an unknown word is encountered? The most effective strategy is to use context and letter patterns to determine the word. This usually takes less than 3 seconds. By listening to a student read aloud from a text where he/she knows 90-99% of the text and analyzing what the reader does to word solve, teachers can quickly assess which strategies are in place and which strategies to teach.
Want to play a quick game that builds fluency? I Have, Who Has is the perfect game for warm-ups and repetitive practice. To play, create enough cards for all the students in your class or group. Some students may have 2 cards.
Word Sorts is an instructional activity that requires students to read, analysis, and categorize words and/or pictures by common characteristics. This strategy can also be used to categorize stories, characters, content area vocabulary, math facts, etc.
This activity raises visual awareness of word parts and in particular, the placement of the vowel. Since English is made up of over 1100 patterns from many different languages, teachers must develop “pattern-detectors” who can read and spell new words using the analogy method. If you know the patterns in the word______, then you can read and spell other words with that pattern (seen or heard).
Ultimately, proficient readers and writers need to get beyond the word-level (decoding and encoding) to the text-level for high-level comprehension and composition. This activity is a simple means to the end.
By the end of third grade, most students can read and spell the 400 most commonly used English words from Dolch high frequency word list. Although 87% of the English language is decodable by using common spelling patterns and rules, many of the high frequency words are not. Therefore, words should be learned by letter name and using multi-sensory instruction. Here are a few ways to actively practice the letter name spelling of high frequency words.
We all can recall the word we missed in the school spelling bee. Mine was business. Who knew there was an “i” in business? I was sure the proctor made a mistake. That secret “i” broke all the rules. It didn’t even make a sound. How very sneaky that “i” was. For my third grade mind, it was completely unfair.
As proficient readers come to unfamiliar words, they use cues to help decipher the word. First, we think: “What would make sense?” Then we think: “What would sound right (grammatically)?” At the same time, we are thinking: “What looks right?” Using the beginning sound or sounds and the word family (known as a chunk or phonogram), we quickly decode the 1-syllable words. To practice decoding fluently, have your students learn the most common word families. If they can read these 36 word families quickly, they will be able to read over 500 other words. Not only that, but students can use their knowledge of word families to spell over 500 words. In spelling, we simply change the question to: “Does this word sound like a word I know?” Proficient spellers use word families to spell by analogy.
A Rubric for Success
Students should write daily for real purposes with publishing being a primary goal. At the third grade level and beyond, students should write imaginative stories that demonstrate an understanding of character development, importance of setting, plot development, climax, and resolution. If you can write it, you can read it, so reading comprehension improves as a result of the focus on writing.
