Word Art

One of the areas we know we need to work on as a school is vocabulary. With a number of second language speakers, this becomes even more important, and with the increasing academic vocabulary as the students move up through the grade levels, knowing the meanings of words is critical.  While I love learning about words, this love isn’t always shared by my students, and I’ve given a lot of thought to ways to make learning new words more engaging, and not just a “drag out the dictionary and copy down the meaning” exercise.

One thing I tried this week was “Word Art”, another idea I got from the book Learning in the Fast Lane, by Suzy Pepper Rollins.  Kids take the word and use it to draw something that represents the meaning of the word but still incorporates the letters. I used the vocabulary words from our first social studies unit on First Americans, and gave the kids a choice about which word to illustrate. Many chose “migration”, and used the letters to show the word “moving” across the paper. One student illustrated “nomad” by having all the letters walking with feet. One of my Muslim students chose “stereotype” and included a picture of a woman in a headscarf using the letter “o”. I think this would be a fun activity to use in any subject area, and I plan to have it as an independent activity during guided reading and intervention times. I posted them on the wall so students will have a chance to see how others illustrated each word, and also so the current unit’s vocabulary is on display while we are in that unit. My colleague found a bunch of adding machine tape and we cut up long strips for the kids to use, which they also enjoyed. I’d recommend this if you’re looking for something a little different to do with vocabulary!

Six-Word Memoirs

The school year has begun, and this year I’ve looped up to fifth grade with my two groups of kids from last year. So far I have loved coming back and just starting in – it seems like we just had a long weekend, and we’re back at it. But one of my concerns was making sure that fifth grade didn’t just feel like a repeat of fourth grade, so I knew I had to alter the routine a bit, and start with something we didn’t do last year. 

The May 2014 issue of The Reading Teacher featured an article called “Every Word is on Trial: Six-Word Memoirs in the Classroom,” by Jane M. Saunders and Emily E. Smith. Students work to come up with six words that describe them or something they are interested in, and then find an image to enhance their memoir. That sounded like something doable (six words isn’t many), fun (computer lab), and it would be a great way to start and finish a writing project the first week.

Following the suggestions in the article, we first looked at Ernest Hemingway’s famous memoir, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  It was a great place to start, as we did a lot of inferencing about what he could have meant. I then pulled up some examples on brainpickings.org of elementary six-word memoirs (www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/09/six-word-memoirs-students), which gave my students some ideas for their work. I was careful to stop at the middle school level, as some of the examples are a little racier than I wanted to share with my class.  Then students all worked to come up with several examples, discussing with classmates if they were short a word or had too many. It was fun to see the discussions of how to condense ideas, or how to change words around to get the best effect. Punctuation also becomes important if you aren’t writing complete sentences, so some students experimented with colons and commas.

After choosing the memoir they liked best, we headed into the computer lab. The article gives many great suggestions of how to present the memoirs, but in the end, I just had students open up a Word document, and then we searched for images on Flickr as they did in the article. Once an image was selected, students dragged them into the Word document, and then typed the memoir below the image. We printed them off in black and white, and then students had the option of using colored pencils to make them more colorful. 

I hung them all up outside our room, and students have really enjoyed reading what others have written. Several staff members have also commented on how nicely they turned out. One colleague suggested doing this periodically throughout the year and using them as a chronicle of fifth grade, which I really like. I also think students could do this as a short way of synthesizing information from other subject areas. I’m going to experiment with this writing form throughout the year and see what I think. For now, it was a great way to start our new year off together.  

Here is my example that I showed the students.