Decoding Meaning

teacherspayteachers.com

news.compusa.com

I found it interesting that knowing 37 spelling patterns will allow children to read and spell over 500 words that children commonly use. I knew there were a lot, but I guess I didn't realize how many there actually were. Another fact that I found interesting while reading Classrooms that Work was that it is estimated for every English word you know, its possible to decode, spell, and find meanings for six or seven other words just from that one original word. An activity that I liked from chapter 5 was The Wheel game, similar to Wheel of Fortune. This probably really stuck out because my mom was actually on the game show back in 2002 and she absolutely dominates at the game. This activity allows the students to use context clues from sentences to figure out what the word is. I think this activity would also become competitive among the students and competition=motivation. Context clues are important. I don't think students understand how much meaning context clues actually give to words. My high school students figured out how much context clues mean this past week with a vocabulary lesson. They couldn't understand why in their stories they needed to include context clues with their vocabulary words, so my mentor teacher gave them a quiz using simple sentences without context clues. The students were so mad that they couldn't figure out the meaning of the words. Lesson learned.