Word Wall
Expanding Vocabulary in Third and Fourth Grade (Virtual Tour)
Stage of Literacy Development:
Stage 3: Literacy for GrowthAges:
8-10
Grade Range:
3rd 4thFood Groups:
Primary: Spelling and Word Study, Vocabulary
Transcript
Throughout the year, the students are introduced to a number of different words. These words are high frequency words, or sight words, so they come up quite a bit in their reading and writing. The words are then posted on our word wall and the students then refer to the word wall when they are working on their writing in Daily Five, or another writing task. As you will notice, some of the words are in yellow and some are blue, this is a mixed class, so there are third graders as well as fourth grade students. And so the blue words would be directed more towards the fourth grade students, and these words would be in their high-frequency list. The word wall is located on this side of the room close to our guided reading table. When I meet with the students during guided reading, we might need to refer to words that are posted on our word wall, and we might be examining different words that are contractions or have different endings and suffixes and so then this location of the word wall works out well during our guided reading sessions. Above the word well, we have other activities that we've done throughout the year. We've worked on creating different charts for synonyms and antonyms, as well as action-words or verbs. The artwork that's above the word wall is also great motivation for getting the students interested in word work, and so they would refer to these charts that are posted above the word wall as well.
Related References
Activity Objective
The goal of Word Wall: Expanding Vocabulary in Third and Fourth Grade (Virtual Tour) is to help students to commit irregularly spelled high frequency words to memory and provide opportunities for exposure to and use of a variety of words.
Quick Tips
Additional Comments:
- High frequency words are the words that appear most often in printed material. Direct students' attention to these words during read-alouds and shared readings.
- Discuss the importance of recognizing high frequency words by sight and the direct impact of this recognition to reading fluency.
- The more often students are exposed to high frequency words the more likely they will be able to commit the spelling of these words to memory.
- Create personal dictionaries and have students add new high frequency words to their dictionaries on a regular basis.
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