Thursday, November 13, 2008

Words

The mind is so amazing!
I am more and more convinced of this with each passing school day. The fact that we enter this world knowing nothing but our mothers voice. We quickly learn the usefulness of a cry and which cry to use when. Then we begin to recognize different things. Those things start to take on meanings and soon an identity; a word.
Words. They in themselves amaze me. Then you add on the fact that we can vocalize them, understand their meaning, spell them, write them, use them to convey a message. Words are powerful!
Watching my kids decode these lettered mysteries has been so much fun for me.
My daughter is an auditory learner. She walks around the house all day long, saying words, sounding them out, spelling them. Sometimes she takes it to the next level and makes list of all the words she knows. She is a lover of words to the core.
A friend of mine was telling me at the start of the school year about her daughters word wall at school. With each new sight word, the teacher adds it to the wall. It sounded like a splendid idea so we started our own. She loves watching new words appear on the wall and she randomly goes to it and makes sentences with her known words. She loves it so much she wants to add EVERY word she knows to it. We have not gone that far but I am thinking about adding some of her word family words so that she can be more creative in her sentence building. One of her sentences from this morning; my mother has a orange
Words.
Words.
Words.
I
L-O-V-E
T-H-E-M
Y-E-S I D-O

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love the word wall idea. I think I may adopt the idea too! Any tips...what does it look like?

momteacherfriend said...

For our word wall I got butterfly die cuts at the teachers store. We write sight words on them as they are introduced. Then each day we read some of the words from the wall. Such as all the blue butterflies or find _______ word. She will often go to the wall herself and read words or try to make sentences.

I seriously think we will be adding a different shape to put up some word family words. Such as bed, red, hit, sit, bit, duck, buck, tuck, puck. I know that she will be able to make more sentences that make sense if we do.

As I am typing this I got the idea for the word family words. I think I am going to make each short vowel sound a different color so she can identify their vowel sounds as well.