January 11th - Weekly Words

Hello families! 

Welcome back to school! I am so happy to have the students back in the classroom. 

I wanted to share a quick blog with you today about a "new" word work program we started in the classroom - Weekly Words. It will be a little bit different than last year! Each week we will focus on a different word family. This program is not meant to be focused on spelling and the memorization of words, but rather to help students develop their reading skills, build phonological awareness, improve penmanship, explore rhyming words and even learn some poetry! For students that are needing more of a challenge, it helps them to learn about some of the more complicated spelling patterns (ie. prefixes, suffixes, doubling a consonant, etc.) 

At the beginning of each week, students will be introduced to the new word family and will work with a partner to brainstorm as many words from that word family as possible. Today we started with "-at" words. We then shared all of our words as a class - including some challenge words! 


Once we create three lists of words, students will choose one of the lists to focus on for the week. I will post these lists on Google Classroom if you are interested in continuing to practice at home. I will also include some suggestions for fun ways to practice at home. Here are the three lists for this week: 

We focused today on the idea of choosing the best list for ourselves and not worrying about what lists our classmates are choosing and refraining from any negative comments about which list someone chose. Each day during work period, students will build or write their words in a different way. Each table group will be given a new way to practice each day. Here are some of the ways we practiced today! (not pictured: stamps)




The reason that students are not choosing their own unique list of words this year is because 1) they kept getting lost and I could not remember 20 unique word lists and 2) we are going to be having optional "spelling quizzes" on Fridays. Again, writing the words is based on being able to identify the beginning, middle and end sounds and allows students to sound out the word (unlike a sight word). I may have mentioned before, but I like to give students a little bit of experience with quizzes even in grade 1/2 to help them see that they do not need to be nervous or worried. I want them to develop some basic "test-taking strategies" that they will be able to use in the future. Often students in grade 3 write the SLA Provincial Exams and I believe students should have some experience with a quiz prior to the SLAs. I hope this makes sense! Again, these will be optional and are not meant to be stressful! If this quizzes aren't going well, we can always adjust and move back to the way we did Weekly Words last year. 

This year I also have a poem to go with each word family, so tomorrow we will be looking at a poem with "-at" words! I can also share this on Google Classroom. 

I will post another blog on Friday to let you know what else we get up to this week! 

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