Monday, June 25, 2012

Word wall surprise!

I am going to set out to write about word walls tomorrow, since I just put one up in my house. RJ and I have been working on sight words, and I have been surprised at how many he knows. I shouldn't be, because his teacher this year was ah-maaaaa-zing. He can write all of his letters, upper and lower case, and he knows all of their sounds. He is learning how to sound words out. He can count on and on and can identify numbers as high as 9,999. Actually he can do 10,999 because we are working on anything to the left of the column is thousands.

So after I put up the letters for the word wall today,I decided to start off by putting only the ones he can identify up on the wall. I took out my set of pre-primer Dolch words and started showing him each one. He identified about half of them. He identified four words from the primer set. He also knows words that aren't in my cards like ball, milk, play, etc. I made cards for those words. He also knows the "it" family - he know i-t says "it" and that if you put an s in front of it, it says "sit," etc. Sit and hit also went up in the wall.

When we got all the cards up there and counted them, we had 27 words all together. I texted his teacher excitedly. She texted back "Don't forget the it, at, and an families. He knows all of those. And his friends' names."

I think I am going to have to find a bigger wall....