Word Walls- here's what I do

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Home : 2004 : July : 22

Word Walls- here's what I do
By TBrown

I use a word wall in my 5th grade room. I love it! I, too, had a hard time finding things for upper grades, but here's what I've come up with.
I give my students challenge vocabulary with their regular spelling words
each week. The words are either: words used in a sujbect area during the week, commonly misspelled words, homophones, or words I know they'll see on the state test. I put the challenge vocab. on the word wall at the start of the week, and add new words each Monday. We play games with the words (at the start of the year our wall is thin, but by the end of the year there are many words).

This is one thing I do:
I say "I'm thinking of a word on the word wall" and they make pick a word on the wall. Then I give 4 clues to let them guess which word it is. After each clue they must look at their word. If it fits the clue, they keep the same word, if not, they must choose a word that matches the clue (and also all previous clues given). Sometimes by the end their word might have changed 3 or 4 times.
Ex.
clue #1: it has at least 2 syllables
clue #2: it starts with a consonant
clue #3: it is a noun
clue #4: a synonym for the word is ...
We then figure out if they guessed the right word.

I also sometimes have them get with their partner (table, row, etc) and come up with ways that they could rearrange the words on the wall. Some groups will say by part of speech, some by # of letters, some by vowel and consonant pattern, some by syllable. Then on paper they must re-write all the words the way they suggested. It makes them have to re-write, and possibly, re-learn the words, and they get to decide if their way of grouping was good or not.

Anyway, e-mail me if you have any questions.