Word Play

In todays’ outreach efforts my theme was WORDS. We started with playing the Heads Up app and the girls loved it. Each took a turn putting the phone on their forehead while the other girls tried to get her to guess what it was. It was most interesting for me to watch what they knew vs. what they didn’t. Elephant and taxi, for example, were easy. Several words (which I sadly can't remember) that were commonplace for me are just not part of their experience.

Popcorn!

Next, I used my Word Yahtzee die and they each rolled a letter and took two minutes to write down as many words that begin with that letter. Some used names of friends or nearby places. Others used common objects. It’s tricky thinking under pressure like that. I found myself struggling with A words.

We then used flashcards of common colors and classroom objects and they had to act out what the object was. One girl had “tape” and we struggled guessing it until she ran into the next room and grabbed some newspaper and started wrapping an item like a present. Perfect.

The girls then experimented with word clouds. We had a few technical issues so I wasn’t able to save their work, but they took the words they had gathered and created a variety of word cloud shapes and using different colors using Tagul and ABCYa. We’ll have to come back to that because I love word clouds as a learning tool.

We turned that same words list into word search puzzles and practiced solving them. We did a bit of work on our Storybird stories and did some listen-and-repeat activities within BrainPop ESL. 

Like any other kids, they don’t like doing things that are hard and would rather jump around to different activities, and I’m still exploring the right balance between giving choice and options and having them focus on a hard task and see it through.

All in all, they reinforced many skills today without even realizing it (navigation, typing, copy/paste, customizing, vocabulary, explaining, writing, fine motor skills, etc.).