Word Walls and Crystal Balls ... can you tell we were discussing rhyme schemes in poetry today? Anyway, this post has nothing to do with poetry ... just wanted to intrigue you with the title. Did it work?
Lately I've been reflecting on my word wall. I LOVE my word wall, and LOVE how it looks in my room, but I don't think I've done enough to make my students interact with it this year. They're not using it as much as they should ... and I'm seeing spelling mistakes that they just shouldn't be making. So I decided to do something about it. Given my students obsession with my cootie catchers, I decided to make a package of cootie catchers designed to get them to interact and USE the word wall. I'm going to hang an envelope on the word wall, and stuff it full of cootie catchers. Every few weeks, when we have a few extra minutes, I'm going to get my students to pair up and grab a cootie catcher (I have 7 different ones in the package) to practice and actually USE the wall. Hopefully, those little mistakes that drive me crazy will start to vanish.
You can click on the picture below to take a peek at my newest set of cootie catchers.
OK - so on to the crystal ball. This is a product I've been working on for a while - all the page linking and animating took quite a bit to complete. I wanted a SMARTboard lesson with a little WOW factor for the students, and I wanted it to be self-correcting so I could use it as a language center next year (already thinking about my working with words centers for the Daily 5 next year) if I was conferring with another student. I made this lesson to practice synonyms and homonyms (getting a little extra vocabulary in, too). You can click on the image to the right to preview it at my TPT store, but you can also take a peek at how it works on the video below (I've just recently starting using the movie capture tool with the notebook software). I'd like to make more language centers with this same crystal ball template - I'm thinking parts of speech may be next ... what do you think? Any ideas?
Happy Tuesday!!!
