Who's Going to Put This in the Dictionary?

(click the image to get a larger, clearer view)

This was an unsolicited-by-me blog post on one of my students' blogs...on our snow day Friday!!

Huzzah!

The Odious Ogre

The Odious Ogre
by Norton Juster
illustrated by Jules Pfeiffer
Scholastic, 2010
review copy provided by the publisher

This is the story of an ogre so awful that the villagers cower in terror underneath tables when the ogre is afoot. This ogre is confident that he's "Absolutely invincible!"

Then he meets a sweet girl who, even though she recognizes his flaws, insists that he's not so terrible. "Overbearing perhaps, arrogant for sure, somewhat self-important, a little too mean and violent, I'm afraid, and a bit messy. Your shoes could certainly use a polishing, but I'll bet if you brushed your teeth combed your hair, found some new clothes, and totally changed your attitude you'd be quite nice."

You might be able to guess that the sweet girl overcomes the odious ogre. The way she does it is a good reminder that huge and unmanageable problems can be brought to their knees without anything more than continuing on the path one knows to be the right one. (Self, are you listening?)

This is a great book for your word study stack. The ogre has a fabulous vocabulary, due to swallowing a dictionary on one pillage or another.


The Odious Ogre by Norton Juster, Illustrated by Jules Feiffer from Expanded Books on Vimeo.

Word Study

Locust, or cicada, is chicharra in Spanish. I know this because as we were looking at the shells and corpses of cicadas that one of my girls brought in (you go, GIRL!), one of my Spanish-speakers walked up and said with an authority that he does not have yet in English, "Chicharra." We all tried to roll our r's as well as he did and the more we said chicharra, the more we sounded like a bunch of cicadas in the trees. Say it! See what I mean?!?

I love that my students are bringing their passions to school already in the third week, and I love that we are adding first-language words to our "juicy" words we're collecting. When the one-third of my class who were gone for Eid on Friday return this week, we'll see if there are words from their language and their celebration that we can add to our list and learn.

Here's where we collect our "juicy" words:

This is the best solution for covering our classroom's mirror that I've ever come up with -- "Reflect on These JUICY Words." The classroom assistant has a pad of sticky notes, and whenever anyone come across a "juicy" word in the book they're reading or I'm reading aloud, in class discussion, overheard in a conversation, etc., they help the assistant put it on a note and post it on the mirror.

Every so often, I type the newest juicy words onto a blank page in the SmartBoard software. This is our electronic Word Wall! I've made each of the words on the word wall a piece of movable text so that we can sort the words, looking for similarities and differences, categories, parts of speech, prefixes, suffixes, etc.

Soon we'll need to make a second page, we've collected so many words. I can't wait to see how this Word Wall project develops. Out of all the ways I've tried to integrate my new SmartBoard into my teaching, this is my favorite so far.