Transcript

As a child I was a horrible speller, I had a lot of difficulty learning to spell. And one of the things that I do to try to help students learn to spell really well is to integrate a Word Wall into my language arts program. And I know a lot of teachers think, sixth grade why is she using a Word Wall, there's lots of things you can do. They still have high frequency word issues, they still have difficulty spelling a lot of the high frequency words, so they go up on the Word Wall. 

At the sixth grade level, something that's different than at the primary is that sixth grade students have a bit of a say in what words go up there. So if they're really struggling to learn a word I'll actually put it up for them, and they know it's there for them and that we're all in a learning process. I in fact have a word that I have trouble with that I put up there, and one of the words that I like to talk to the students about is the word tomorrow. When I first started teaching 21 years ago, I could not remember whether it was a double M or a double R in tomorrow. And I had a little boy in the class, I said this to the class, the little boy in the class said "my name is Tom. You will never forget again. Tom has only one M, tomorrow has only one M." And for 21 years I've been able to spell tomorrow and so have all my students because I've told them that story. 

So I struggled with spelling and I want to help the students learn how to spell better. And we look at letter patterns quite a bit so that they improve quite a lot. Another way I like to use the Word Wall is when I have a minute here or there I like to do some word games. So, I have a deck of cards and I'll ask the students certain questions, especially, I find, if we're waiting to be called down to an assembly and we've got three minutes, what are you going to do. You don't know whether you have enough time to start the next activity, here's something that will fill in three minutes maybe five minutes and the kids will be really excited about it. So some of the questions that I ask are, look at the Word Wall and find a verb that's in the past tense, or find a verb that is an irregular verb, or a regular verb, find a word that has five syllables, find a word that can be a noun and a verb. There are lots of different cards, different things that you can do, prefixes and suffixes, and it helps the children become more familiar with words.

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