Using Words You Know

I enjoy doing word work with my students and they benefit greatly from the practice.  One activity that I find very helpful and worthwhile doing is Using Words You know.  Have you used it?   We used colored paper this time.  It is amazing how motivating it is for the students when you change up the paper a bit! Take 3 words the students know and write them across the top of the paper. I like for students to write the chunks in red to help the chunk to stand out to them.  Then I call out other words that have the same chunk and spelling pattern and they write the new word in the column where it goes.  We say "if you can spell thing, you can spell bring"  to get them to transfer the  skill of using a word you already know to help you spell a new word.  Always trying to build on the knowledge they already have.  Then the next very important step is to write a new word, but not read it to them.  They must read the new word using the other words and chunks to help them.  You can see the space between the groups of words on the paper where we did this.  One group towards the top of the paper for helping us spell and then other words after the gap where we used the words to help us read new words.  It is all in the transfer of the skills!  Then last we use some of the words from our groups in a sentence.  The sentence can be silly or serious, but must make sense.  This is also a way to get in practice with capitals and end marks as I tell them they cannot read their sentence to me if the sentence is not written correctly.  It is amazing to me how students cannot seem to always remember to use capitalization or punctuation!  If we have time, they can do a quick sketch of their sentence.  Today though we did not have time.   This activity really builds the skill of using what you already know to spell and read other words.  And bonus, the kids think it is fun too!