Word Game Wednesday

Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is not path and leave a trail.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Word Game Wednesday

What would you like to do?

Play Word Around? Rhyme Out? Bananagrams? Do not

dawdle; find a group and go

tinker with words! Play Scrabble; observe where

the

words intersect, criss-crossing a path

of letters that may

lead

to unexpected mergers. Perhaps go

online instead

and play Free Rice, where

you earn kernels of rice for nuggets of knowledge. There

is

no

guarantee, but Word Game Wednesday could have been the path

that led us to be homophone, homonym, and

homograph hunters. Words open the world. Using them, we leave

a

splendiferous trail.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2018

OLW Goes to School

Do

Live

Try

Brave

Exercise

Respect

Friendly

Family

Decide

Moderation

Hope

Balance

This year, I have invited my students to choose their own One Little Word. The above is a list of some of the words my students and the other adults who work in or visit my classroom have chosen.

I am impressed with the perceptiveness of some of my students. They didn't take this choosing lightly, and their words are ones they will be able to live into and grow with throughout the year.

Today, we spent some time with dictionaries and thesauruses looking up and brainstorming synonyms, antonyms and related words.

Perfect timing for this book to show up:

The Right Word
by Jen Bryant
illustrated by Melissa Sweet
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2014

I can't wait to introduce my students to Peter Mark Roget, a man whose passion for list-making and words began at the age of 8 and resulted in the most amazing resource book of language -- a book that has remained in print from 1852 until today.

The thesauruses we have in our classroom are alphabetical. I'd love to be able to get ahold of some that are topical, the way Roget originally organized his.

At any rate, this will be the perfect book at the perfect time as my students consider the meanings and nuances of their OLWs for the year.

The Power of Precise Language

It's DigiLit Sunday at Reflections on the Teche!

Check out all the digital literacy posts for this week.

As we wrap up our final research/nonfiction writing project, it's fun to see that my students are much more savvy about Internet searches than they were even a couple of months ago when they were satisfied to pose the exact question I'd given them to Mr. Google and fumble around with whatever information he decided to give them.

After their Evil Teacher forced them to use an encyclopedia repeatedly to gather information, my poor benighted students are much more willing to browse an online article (or even, heaven forbid, a book) for basic information before heading to more specialized sites. (Resisting the urge to say, "Told you so...")

And they are learning the power of precise language both in their Internet searches, as well as in their spoken language. My favorite example of the first is the girl who got lists of celebrities when searching "famous science people from Texas." She got what she wanted when I suggested she switch to "famous scientists from Texas." One precise word makes a huge difference. My favorite examples of the second include the boy who told me, "There were lots of presidents in my state." When I expressed confusion about how that could be, he reworded his statement to say, "There were a lot of presidents born in my state." Another student complained, "There's nothing about history in this book!" When I located an entire section about history in the table of contents, he reworded his statement, "There's nothing about the history of the native people of Florida in this book." Much better. Much clearer.

Poetry Friday -- Ummm...

Ode to the Word on the Tip of My Tongue

You're so...
(I'm speechless)

Whenever you...
(I'm mum)

The best thing...
(I'm silenced)

I love how you...
(struck dumb)


© Mary Lee Hahn, 2013

Tara has the Poetry Friday Roundup at A Teaching Life.

Poetry Friday -- Sharing Words

Growing up with a big brother wasn't always fun. But being a grown up with a big brother is pretty awesome!

One of the things we share is a love of words. My brother has taken to sending me cellphone pics of words he finds around New York City.

He recently found these words on the sidewalk of a street that leads up to the Main Library (lion entrance):

And this week, he shared this poem that he found on the subway--a poem about how a shift in tracks can be jarring, but how the lights DO come back on again after the shift (hallelujah):

He sent along these links: an easier to read view of the poem, and the poet Charles Reznikoff's bio on the Poetry Foundation website. Reznikoff had a fascinating (and hard) life, and was never much acclaimed as a poet while living. I'm pleased to be able to help his work live on. A quote at the end of his bio says it best:

"On the death of Yeats in 1939, Auden wrote that, when he dies, the poet becomes his admirers. That is what has now happened to Reznikoff. He is no longer driven by the compulsion to create. It is not up to him now; it is up to those who are left behind and who think that they may have deciphered something of the meaning which he strove faithfully to create."

Today's Poetry Friday round up is hosted by Jama at Jama's Alphabet Soup.

Playing With Words--A Picture Book With Fun Plurals!

I was determined not to buy a book last week when I popped into a bookstore before meeting a friend for dinner. But I could not resist adding one more book to my Word Play collection.  One Foot, Two Feet:  An EXCEPTIONal Counting Book by Peter Maloney and Felicia Zekauskas is a counting book that celebrates irregular plural nouns.

Each number is introduced with a single object--such as "One Foot".   The illustration of a single foot shows through a cut-out frame in the page.  When the reader turns the page, he/she realizes that only part of the illustration has been visible and the one object turns into a group of objects--such as "Two Feet".  The book works its way from 1-10 (and then a billion:-) starting back at one for each new object.

Readers are introduced to words like mouse and mice, ox and oxen, octopus and octopi and more.

This book can be enjoyed in so many ways.  Without even thinking about the irregular plurals, this is a fun counting book for young children.  The numbers, the groups, and the illustrations make it a great concept book.  But the irregular plurals make it very unique.  I think this one will be a hit for so many reasons:-)

Poetry Friday: Dictionaries

(Click on the image to enlarge it.) This is an original dictionary created by one of my fourth graders. You have to admit, it's pretty amazing! It's an ongoing project, and it inspired many of the other students in my class to create original words. 

If the speaker in the following poem had done his book report on the Korindictionary, he would have been way more entertained:

BOOK REPORT ON THE DICTIONARY

by

Gregory K.

I found the plot missing,

The dialog weak.

I kept waiting and waiting for someone to speak.

The characters bored me.

In fact, there weren’t any!

The jokes were not funny, and there weren’t too many.

(the rest of the poem is here)

Toby is hosting the Poetry Friday round up at The Writer's Armchair. Let's go check out the words and poems everyone has chosen to share this week!

Goodbye, Badbye

P.S.S. I love Kidblog! 

Word Work

I'm always looking for fun, engaging, motivating ways for my fourth graders to build up their knowledge of the way words are built -- roots, prefixes, suffixes, and even the little parts that make rhymes, like -at, and -up that make cat and pup.

This week, I tried out this game, Eight Letters In Search of a Word, with my students. I was worried that they would get frustrated, and some did, but because they have grown up on Nintendo and Xbox and Game Boy, they had no problem with running out of time and trying again. They worked to beat their own high scores, they were realistic about low scores when they got a tough set of letters, and when one student figured out the "big word," a new standard was set for ALL of the students (a REAL standard set by the students, not by some governmental committee...but don't get me started). They got really good at finding every variation possible on a small word by substituting consonants, they were smart about using s to make every plural possible, and they worked -ed and -ing for all they were worth when they got those letter combinations. Because all the letters given can ultimately make up an 8-letter word, there was even a little vocabulary development thrown in. When you play this game, you might think it is too hard for 9 and 10 year olds. That is, however, precisely why they liked it so much. It was hard. They had to work for their success. They knew they earned it when they got a high score. And those times when they got the "big word?" Priceless.

Next week, we're going to see how much rice we can donate through the United Nations to help end world hunger by learning new vocabulary words. At Free Rice, you donate 20 grains of rice for every vocabulary word you get right. As you play, the game automatically levels the words you get -- if you get words right, you get harder words, if you miss words, you get easier words. I'm not sure how this will work with my students. Just like we did with 8 Letters, we will play together first, with my computer hooked up to the class TV. I think we can have some great conversations about root words and related words that can help us make a smart guess about the words. Stay tuned for a report on how this goes in my classroom. In the meantime, how much rice did you donate today?

BIG News

Ginormous made it into the new edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. I remember hearing my students (one in particular...you know who you are) use this word for the first time four years ago.

Here's my prediction for a word that will be added some time soon, based on 1. my inability to break my students of saying it, even after two years of intensive interventions, 2. the efficiency of this word compared with the "correct" version, and 3. I broke down and used it myself. The word? VERSE, vb., meaning to compete with someone in a game or sport. "I'm going to verse him in chess." The roots of this word are in the preposition VERSUS, as in Army vs. Navy. (The correct/clunky/inefficient way to say "verse?" "Go against." How does "go against" relate to versus? On the other hand, it is clear to see how "verse" relates to versus.) Other words in the dictionary around VERSUS include, as a reminder that language is a living, changing thing: versatile and version.

For other new words that made it into the dictionary, see USA Today's AP story.

Silly Words Day!

Nancy at Journey Woman has proclaimed March 31 SILLY WORDS DAY!

My students and I are always on the lookout for words that are fun to say and/or spell. Here are a few we treasure (in order from shortest to longest):

Zit (won't be long before they abhor that word!)
Dilfy (a made-up mom word for messy)
Atlatl (a prehistoric spear thrower)
Boonka (a word remembered from pre-speech, meaning blanket)
Kwakiutl (a NW tribe of Native Americans)
Mississippi (fun to say and more fun to spell FAST)
Tegucigalpa (the capital of Honduras)
Onomatopoeia (fun to say and spell)
Gift Certificate (because the nominator only recently mastered the pronunciation of certificate...cerFITicate? cerFICKatut? Plus, they're fun to get!)
Pachycephalosaurus (there's nothing better than dinosaur names!)
Antidisestablishmentarianism (is that really a word?)
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (we KNOW that's not a word, but it's delicious!)