Raising the Quality of Word Work

This week we are revisiting word work. As Gail Boushey and Joan Moser write in The Daily 5, the proper goal of word work is to give students the opportunity to “experiment with spelling patterns, memorize high-frequency words, and develop a genuine curiosity and interest in new and unique words. By playing with words, word patterns, word families, prefixes, suffixes, and so on, students hone their knowledge of words and increase their writing skills." Teachers can help their students meet this goal in beneficial and meaningful ways by thinking of word work as a way for students to learn how words work and as a way to help them become better readers and writers. Here are some ways to make word work time more beneficial for your students.

Word Sorts

Sorting words is an activity that is strongly advocated by the word work wizards Donald Bear, Marcia Invernizzi, Shane Templeton, and Francine Johnston. Word sorts engage students in analyzing words by sorting them into categories. Categories can be anything from consonant sounds to vowel sounds, word families, affixes, or even what the words mean, to name a few. The category can be determined by the teacher (closed sort) or by the student (open sort). Sorting focuses children's attention on what they already know about words and encourages them to focus specifically on the similarities and/or differences between selected words. It provides children with multiple exposures to selected words and requires them to think about the words from a particular perspective.  Google “short ‘a’ word sort” (or word sort on any element of study), and you will find many ready-to-go sorts. Or you can always create your own.

Making Words

This activity, developed by Pat Cunningham, engages children in making smaller words from a “mystery word.” Students work with letter cards or letter tiles. They start by making two-letter words and then three-letter words, and they continue until they have used all of the letters to make the mystery word. After this activity is done as a whole-class or small-group activity, it can easily be repeated as an independent task. Have the children record the words that they make on paper.

Classroom Word Hunt

Give students a sheet of spelling paper attached to a clipboard and send them off on a hunt. Ask them to find words in a specific category. There are almost endless possible choices for the category. A few examples are words in plural form, words with long vowels, words with short vowels, words with two syllables, words with three syllables, and words with silent letters. Rather than having students look through books, limit the hunt to words already present in the classroom environment, which includes anchor charts, bulletin-board displays, name tags, procedural charts, labels, word walls, and vocabulary charts. Again, this activity can be teacher directed or student directed.

Children's Literature Focused on Words

Students can do word work by reading books that focus on words. Here is a list of a few books with some very brief descriptions. 

1. Andy, That’s My Name (DePaolo, 1999) is almost wordless, except for a boy adding to and moving around the letters in his name. This provides wonderful practice for the -an word family.
2. There’s an Ant in Anthony (Most, 1992) is a story of a boy who finds the word ant in different words.
3. Dear Deer (Barretta, 2007) helps to shed some light on confusing homonyms.
4. Once There was a Bull … (Frog) by Rick Walton (1995) is a very clever book about compound words.
5. Here Comes Silent e! (Hays,2004) is a beginning reader in the Step into Reading series. The main character, a boy with a lowercase e on his shirt, goes through the story changing bit into bite, kit into kite, and pin into pine. Of course, the children can follow up by creating their own list of CVC and CVCe pairs of words.

Word Games

There are three categories of word games: teacher-made games, store-bought games, and online games. Children get tremendous joy and valuable practice from teacher-made games. Make Go Fish cards or Dominoes with sight words or vocabulary words. Go to http://www.mes-english.com/games/boardgames.php to get blank game boards. The students roll a die and go around the game board. They must be able to read the word on the square where they land. The game squares may include sight words, vocabulary words, words that feature a particular phonics element, or words that come from a particular family. You can make the game a little more interesting by including squares that have instructions such as, “Miss one turn,” “Roll again,” or “Go back two squares.” You will never need to make any game more than once—laminate it the first time and keep it for years. Attach it to a file folder for easy storage and for retrieval whenever students are ready to practice the skill that the game focuses on.

Games from the store can be very appealing to students. For grades 1-3, try Scrabble Junior, Boggle Jr., The Great Word Road Race, What’s Gnu?, Zingo (Word Builder or Sight Words), or Appletter. For grades 3-6, try Bananagrams, Scrabble, Boggle, or Tapple. Teach a few students how to play each game, and let them teach the rest.

Along with teacher-made and store-bought games, online word games are a good option for students as well. There are many good spelling apps and spelling sites that would be beneficial for your students to learn about words.

Word Production

Younger students benefit tremendously from producing letters and words in different ways. Give them whiteboards, magnetic letters, letter tiles, letter stamps, Wikki Stix, Play-Doh, cereal, and macaroni. The action of writing and saying the words helps to ingrain those words and letters into their long-term memory.

Frost, Shari. "Raising the Quality of Word Work." Web log post. Choice Literacy, n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.