Spelling/Vocab Activities & Writing SHOW-OFF Sentences!

By teachingspecialthinkers | February 1, 2013 |

Spelling packets for weekly homework can be a pretty boring, daunting task for our students. The 4th grade teachers I work with decided to spice it up a bit from now on and gave their students an option sheet. There are about 10 different options and each option has a point value. The students have to complete enough activities to have 100 points, and they can go over for ExTrA CrEdIt. Sometimes, the spelling words are also the weekly vocab words, so it is also important for the students to not only know how to spell the words, but know what they mean. I personally LOVE this change, and I know the students do as well! Here are some of their options:

Newspaper/Magazine Cut-outs (My personal favorite! I love how these look!!)
Word Shape (Use the word to create the picture)
Symbol/Drawing

You can have students used Word Shapes and Symbol/Drawings for any new “term” introduced, regardless of the subject! These words are from a social studies unit on the Revolutionary War. I love using these because the students aren’t just copying the words OVER and OVER, or looking up the word definition in the back of the book and using the word in the sentence. With these activities, students are MAKING CONNECTIONS and those connections engrave the words in their brains. It’s amazing!

Another thing I introduced this week was Sentence Strips. My students cannot for the life of me write in complete sentences. Their classroom teachers and I having been stressing on Sentence S.W.A.G. which I believe originated from the wonderful Amy Lemons. Below is the little anchor chart I created for my classroom and I printed off mini-versions of what is below for my students to reference.

I also created a SHOW OFF sentence strip foldable for daily practice with writing complete, juicy sentences!
To create the sentence strip foldables, just cut on the lines, and put the strips on top of one another and staple so that each of words on the side of the paper show and the students are able to fold them back to write their responses to the questions (refer to the pictures above or below).
Here is an example of what the student should put for each tab:
Who (noun/subject): My sister
What (verb phrase): Sarah went shopping
Where: Sarah went shopping at the mall
When: Yesterday, Sarah went shopping at the mall
Why: Yesterday, Sarah went shopping at the mall to buy a new purse that was on sale
Details (adjectives!): frugal sister, ginormous robinson mall, ruby red kate spade purse
SWAG: Yesterday, my frugal sister went shopping at the ginormous robinson mall to buy a new ruby red kate spade purse
Show off: (here, the student must write their final sentence in their neatest writing!) Yesterday, my frugal sister went shopping at the ginormous Robinson mall to buy a new ruby red Kate Spade purse.
Here is a student’s corrected sentence in the SWAG tab before she wrote her final sentence.
Here is her final sentence on the last “SHOW OFF” tab. {sorry it’s so hard to see the writing in pencil!}
CLICK HERE TO DOWN THIS FREEBIE FOLDABLE!
You can chose to have the student re-write the sentence as they add OR just write down the specific this for each tab, and put it all together at the end. You can have them do one a day as a warm-up, as a reading station using new vocabulary or spelling words, or in your writing workshop time.
TGIF!! {We had a snow day today – LOVE LOVE LOVE}

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Posted in Uncategorized, writing

1 Comment

  1. Brandon hoppe on June 29, 2013 at 5:26 am

    Using some good spelling vocabulary is good advantage for each of the individual to have an impressive result of different spelling activities in schools and in different English works as well.

    best website for writing essays.

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