Thanks! Word Wiz Movies and the surveys that go with them happen once or twice a year. It depends on the pace of the current group of kids I have and other projects that need to be wrapped up.
Isabel Beck, Margaret G. McKeown and Linda Kucan have written a fabulous vocab book, BRINGING WORDS TO LIFE! You have to check it out. I follow their weekly sched. The examples below are from them. Beck & McKeown is my vocab bible!!! :)
DAY 1: Intro new words using pictures that illustrate each word. Question kids to elicit meaning for the words and together come up with kid-friendly definitions. The kids write those definitions in their Word Wiz notebooks. (Imagine funny pics for words like gape, spectator or scrutinize.)
DAYS 2-4: Sentence Completion Activities (Students offer suggestions and copy into the WW notebook. We do this together so they have a STRONG example of a sentence for each word.)
They also chose between pairs of target words in responding questions, e.g. "What would you probably call every person watching a football game? (Inspectors or Spectators?) We do this game in teams. FUN!
Kids also select the target word that fits into a CLOSED sentence, e.g. "The accomplice wiped away the burglar's fingerprints before the police came, so the ______ couldn't find any clues to the crime."
We do activities to learn how words are alike or different. They choose words that fit descriptions e.g. "They're both people who use their eyes in special ways. One watches something for fun; the other one checks things for a living." And of course all this is physical... we do skits and make silly faces to act out differences.
Day 5:
Kids are assessed with a multiple choice test. After all the games and hand-on activities, the test is a joke. It is actually just great for their little egos to take a test they know they will pass with flying colors. We often end up sticking with a set of words for as much as two weeks because we end up creating some sort of grand project for the words. (My amazing co-teacher KEVIN WON saw Angela's Bunyi's Vocabulary Parade and he decided to have a VOCABULARY RUNWAY SHOW. The kids dressed as "Colossal, Benevolent, etc" and they strutted their stuff down the runway complete with flashing cameras, blasting music and the rest of the school cheering them on. )
I realized that when I concentrated more on kids living and breathing the words, having a good time with them, they retained more info than if I pressed them to stick to some sort of vocabulary pacing calendar.
Elizabeth,
Thanks! Word Wiz Movies and the surveys that go with them happen once or twice a year. It depends on the pace of the current group of kids I have and other projects that need to be wrapped up.
Isabel Beck, Margaret G. McKeown and Linda Kucan have written a fabulous vocab book, BRINGING WORDS TO LIFE! You have to check it out. I follow their weekly sched. The examples below are from them. Beck & McKeown is my vocab bible!!! :)
DAY 1: Intro new words using pictures that illustrate each word. Question kids to elicit meaning for the words and together come up with kid-friendly definitions. The kids write those definitions in their Word Wiz notebooks. (Imagine funny pics for words like gape, spectator or scrutinize.)
DAYS 2-4: Sentence Completion Activities (Students offer suggestions and copy into the WW notebook. We do this together so they have a STRONG example of a sentence for each word.)
They also chose between pairs of target words in responding questions, e.g. "What would you probably call every person watching a football game? (Inspectors or Spectators?) We do this game in teams. FUN!
Kids also select the target word that fits into a CLOSED sentence, e.g. "The accomplice wiped away the burglar's fingerprints before the police came, so the ______ couldn't find any clues to the crime."
We do activities to learn how words are alike or different. They choose words that fit descriptions e.g. "They're both people who use their eyes in special ways. One watches something for fun; the other one checks things for a living." And of course all this is physical... we do skits and make silly faces to act out differences.
Day 5:
Kids are assessed with a multiple choice test. After all the games and hand-on activities, the test is a joke. It is actually just great for their little egos to take a test they know they will pass with flying colors. We often end up sticking with a set of words for as much as two weeks because we end up creating some sort of grand project for the words. (My amazing co-teacher KEVIN WON saw Angela's Bunyi's Vocabulary Parade and he decided to have a VOCABULARY RUNWAY SHOW. The kids dressed as "Colossal, Benevolent, etc" and they strutted their stuff down the runway complete with flashing cameras, blasting music and the rest of the school cheering them on. )
I realized that when I concentrated more on kids living and breathing the words, having a good time with them, they retained more info than if I pressed them to stick to some sort of vocabulary pacing calendar.
Hope this was helpful! :)
Christy