Spelling & Word Chunks

This past summer, my sweet friend, Amy, and I decided we needed to revamp our spelling. We were using the spelling lists that came with our reading program, and really, I feel like many of the kids were just memorizing for the test-not really learning the spelling patterns. This year we are doing word chunks and I am LOVING it! We structured our spelling based on this book:

Each week, we have a focus poem. We find helpful chunk words from the poem, and focus on 3 to 4 a week. My kids are doing GREAT! And they are actually using the chunks in their writing! They always point out old chunks and underline chunks in their work. LOVE IT!

For the spelling test, I give the kids 10 chunk words to study (most are 2 syllable words, some just have blends and digraphs). Then I add anywhere from 1-5 extra words (sight words, old chunks we need to review). On test day I give them 5 secret words that they don't get to study. They have to apply what they have learned.

It is very easy for all students to work on the same chunks, but you can modify the words for your struggling students, as well as your gifted students :)

Here is what our poetry and word work journal looks like. Our poem goes on the left, and we sort chunk words on the right. **Sidebar-this poem is also a great one to teach blends and adjectives!**

Here is what our Word Chunk Wall looks like currently. (I cut off the "U" and "Other" chunks, sorry!)

So this is kind of what our week looks like currently...

Monday: Introduce new poem at morning meeting (written on chart paper). Ask kids what they think would be helpful chunks. Pick out 3-4 (pre-selected) chunking words. Underline chunks in poem with highlighting tape (so I can reuse the poems on chart paper year after year :). Then I write the chunk words on construction paper in front of them. I do not have these pre-made, although I realllllly wanted to! I think they are more meaningful since we write them together. I give the students a copy of the poem and we read it again and circle our chunk words. Then they cut it out and glue it in their journal. We also go over our spelling words for the week.

Tuesday: We reread our poem. Review the chunks. Brainstorm words that have our chunks on the whiteboard. Then the students sort their spelling words on the right side of their journals. They will add other words at their own pace throughout the week.

Wednesday: I have a cut and paste word sort for my kiddos to do.

Thursday: We play our word chunk race! My kids get their marker boards. I give them one minute. They write as many words as they can think of for the first chunk. Then, I give them another minute, and I call on students to tell me as many chunk words as they can! I write them all on the board. Then it's my turn! Except I only get 30 seconds and I have to do it alone! (I don't win very often!) We repeat this for each chunk. They love playing against Mrs. Lynes :)

Friday: We play Sparkle and take our test.

When we have extra time throughout the day, I let them get out Word Work materials (magnets, pipe cleaners, stamps, etc). Once I get it up and running, it will be a rotation as part of Daily 5.

TGI (almost) F!

Apple Week!

I can't believe that Apple Week is over! The school year is really flying!!! We had a great week learning about Johnny Appleseed and doing different activities involving apples! At the end of the week we made homemade applesauce and the kiddos brought apple snacks for our apple tasting party. YUM! Here are just a few photos of some of the things we did this week.

Of course we read several versions of Johnny Appleseed and discussed what we learned, as well as comparing the stories.

I introduced adjectives to my students by giving them each a piece of a granny smith apple. I told them to use their senses to describe it. The very last thing they could do was taste it. They talked with their neighbors and then they came up with words to describe the apple! (I used this prompt to help make sure they were coming up with adjectives: I have a _____ apple). I wrote their responses on our huge apple (below). Next, I gave them a piece of a gala apple. We repeated the process, and of course they came up with different adjectives since the two apples look and taste different :)

The next day, we reviewed adjectives and I had them use adjectives to describe different things in our classroom aloud. Then they made these cute adjective apples!

This week, we worked on addition story problems. I had my students write story problems with apple stickers!

I had each of my students bring an apple to school on Wednesday to be used for some graphing and measurement activities. (Then of course we would use them for our applesauce!) First we graphed the color of apples we brought. At the bottom I had some questions about the graph for my kiddos to answer.

The next day we worked on measurement (and estimation) using standard and nonstandard units. First, we practiced measuring things that had a straight edge. We found that was pretty easy! We wanted to measure our apples, but could we measure something round using a ruler? Not really! So we decided it'd be easier if we put yarn around our apples and then measured that! I had my students measure (to the nearest unit) their apples using unifix cubes, dominoes, pennies, inches and centimeters. They did awesome!

My kiddos also got to make apple transformations. I have decided that next year I will now show them an example of an apple transformation... I may do a different object so they get the jist of it. Because even when you tell them 45 times, "No copying Mrs. Lynes!" you get about 10 who still do :) But they are still adorable regardless!

I can't believe Apple Week is already over! Pretty soon it'll be onto pumpkins, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas!! Eeep!

Communities

The first two and a half weeks of school have been awesome! I absolutely love my class-they are the sweetest kiddos! They are making it so easy to implement Daily 5 and I just know it's going to be a fantastic year! I will write about how Daily 5 is going in a future post :)

The past week or two we have been focusing on communities and mapping skills for social studies. We have read these stories from our basal to help compare the characteristics of different kinds of communities:

 

I am still trying to learn that I can LET GO OF THE BASAL while doing Daily 5, but these two stories went really well with communities. We have been comparing urban, suburban and rural. They loooved seeing my photos from NYC and Chicago, too! Many of them had no idea just how big a city could actually be!

 I made this bulletin board and we sorted out the different characteristics of each community:

Then, we made our own model of the different communities using milk cartons! The model turned out so cute, and I think they really got it! :) (This is a photo of my friend Amy's class' model-I forgot to take a picture of ours and had already let my kiddos take their buildings home!)

So stinkin' cute, right? :) The following day, we started our mapping skills. We made a map of our model. We learned that we needed a title for our maps, as well as a map key!

We will continue our mapping skills this week. We will read

and the kiddos will have homework-make a map of their bedroom! They will have to include a title and at least 5 symbols in their map key. I can't wait to see what they come up with!

Hope everyone has a great rest of the weekend!