Make any wall a word wall!

If you have a wall with nothing hanging on it, and a preschool aged kiddo that loves books and language play, you have got to check out word walls.  If you Google "word wall," all kinds of images come up.  Word walls are exactly what they sound like - they are an area where you display words, usually.  All you need is some alphabet cards and some word cards, and something to stick them to the wall.

I have done a different twist on it in my own classroom when I was teaching 2's. I used pictures.

Picture "word" wall

The only words I used in this picture word wall were the kids' names.  The rest were pictures of things that began with each letter's sound.  We did short vowel sounds - A for Alligator, E for Elephant, I for Igloo, O for Octopus, U for Umbrella.  With consonants we focused on the most common sound - for example, the hard "k" sound of the letter C.


RJ is three and is ready for sight words.  Sight words are the most common words you see in print.  Since the English language has some pretty complicated rules, "sound it out" isn't always an option for beginning readers.  Just like we memorize addition fact and multiplication tables in order to speed up the process of doing more complicated math, we memorize sight words in order to built speed and fluency with reading. 


RJ has been working with a great teacher all year, and I have been working with him this summer, so I decided to check out and see what sight words he knows and put those words on our word wall to start with.  Boy was I surprised!

Sight Words Word Wall

These are the words RJ knows so far.  Most of them are sight words but he also knows milk, hit, and play. All together, there are 27 words on the wall!  He knows many of the words on the Preprimer list of Dolch Sight Words. 


We are using our word wall to reinforce the words RJ already knows, and then he is using those words in other learning situations.  When we read a book, I trail my finger along the print and pause when I come to a word he knows, so we do a shared reading of the text.  We take words like at, it, and in and play word addition - for example, c + at = cat. You write C, make the sound, write at, and say "at," then blend the word together to make "cat."


I love working with my beginning reader.  He is so excited about his word wall, and I can't wait to see what words we add next!

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....

Early literacy with preschoolers

My whole world revolves around being a mom these days.  I love it that way. There was a time, however, when I did things other than be a mom.  I worked several jobs and got a college degree in Education.  Graduated with honors, actually (yes, I am bragging, but it was hard work!). I graduated in December and before I could get a job, I was pregnant with my first. Now that my son is three years old, I felt like it was time to start flexing those rusty teaching muscles. We did a week long lesson on a book, where he progressively took over reading the book for me.  When I posted the end of the week video on Facebook, people were impressed with my kiddo "reading" the book. He really more memorized it, although he does remember certain words from the book if I write them down and ask him what they say.

Here's how we did it. First, he is in a summer program with a wonderful teacher and one of her sight words of the week was "it."  I looked through his Brand New Readers and picked out a book that had the word "it" in it multiple times. It was a very repetitive story - the little girl does something to get the ball moving, the dog catches it.

Day 1: First I wrote down the word "it" and put it in our pocket chart on the wall in the kitchen. He loves having words in that chart. He very quickly learned that i-t- spells it. When I introduced the book for the first time, I showed him the pictures and read the description on the inside cover of the book (all Brand New Readers have this, it's a great tool).  We talked about the dog and the little girl and what they were doing.  Then I showed him the word "it" in the book and asked him "What does i-t spell?" When he answered correctly I said "Good! Every time you see the word it, I want YOU to say "IT!" We read the book through twice, with me pointing to the words as we went.

Day 2: I showed him the cover of the book and asked him if he remembered the title. He said "It says 'CATCH!'" *smarty pants* I asked him if he remembered what they were playing, he said they were going to play catch with a ball. Ball was repeated every other page, so when I started reading I paused at that word and asked him "Do you know what that says?" He said "Ball?" I said "Yes, so every time you see b-a-l-l, you can read it!" Catches was also repeated, so we did the same with catches. We read it twice through, this time with me holding his hand and trailing across the words while we read.

Day 3: My little smarty pants was able to read the book to me. He trailed the words with his fingers like a pro and looked at the picture if he came across a word he didn't know.  My hubby said "He just memorized it." Well... yeah, he did to an extent, but that's the point of sight words (which was the main focus).  So I made a game with the text of the book.  I wrote out the whole book in sentence strips.  RJ and I used them as a puzzle to put the story together.  I would read him a line, he would decide where it went in the story.  We built the story from title to end, then read it together. I would pop-quiz him on the more common words.

Day 4: I went out and bought a pocket chart to put our story puzzle into.  We ordered the story - this time, RJ was able to tell the difference between the action words throw, hit, and kick by using his beginning letter sounds. He was able to order the story himself.  I then gave him a pointer and had him read the words. I am going to try to upload a video below showing how he did:

Hopefully the edits will work and the video will turn right side up hahaha. He loved doing this every day.  The words he has retained from the story are "it" and "ball." The repetitive nature of the story gave him the confidence to read fluidly, and he loves using the pointer. I can't wait to start the next book with him!