Making words has been proven to be a powerful activity because there are endless opportunities for students to experiment and play with the newly emerging language they are learning. This method allows for slow or fast learners to be activity involved in a challenging activity. I really liked the ideas for creating a classroom environment where all students could actively participate, and the possibilities for word making are endless. Using this method in the classroom allows for a very interactive classroom: students interact with one another and the teacher interacts as well. The article also gave insight on how to create a lesson using "making words." Some of the suggestions include what letters to use when starting the activity, telling students which letter to change, adding letters to make another word, and even choosing words that rhyme or have similar meanings. 
The "Ten Important Words Plus" program is also very interesting. This method prompts students to actively engage with the ideas and language of a text as they read. By using context the students have multiple exposures to words such as reading them, writing them, talking about them, and even thinking about them in alternative ways.
I thought that these articles were very interesting and they gave a lot of good suggestions that I think I would like to use in my classroom one day. The activities seem fun and high pace in some cases, which would be good for many of the students. Do you think the ideas given in the articles are good, do you think they could be enhanced in any way? What other methods can you think of to make reading and writing fun for students of all learning abilities?
I really liked the ideas in the book I guess because the majority of the vocab I did was take home and memorize. You could take the activities in the articles a step farther and try to have students compose songs or short poems out the vocab words.
ReplyDeleteMy placement teacher at Sarah Moore Green, Ms. Powell, made great use of some of these methods within her first grade classroom. I felt that the idea of having the students so very much involved made a large difference in the classroom because it was so involved and engaging for the studnets. They reacted so well to these types of activities as she incorporated a lot of them within her stations, but many were used as class participation as well. I will for sure access this type of interactive learning in my future class because I feel it is important to some students for them to feel as if they are part of the process.
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