Vocabulary Hanging Words For Class 2

[Shima Costar]

Whatare your thoughts about sound walls and word walls? I don't necessarily think these would replace a word wall...do you? The video and training can be found here for sounds walls: =vxV4Rq1F00M&feature=youtu.be My response was this: I think for oral language, phonemic awareness and phonics the sound walls are awesome, and very helpful visually for beginning readers to unlock how sounds, symbols and words are put together. I think these types of walls would be seen more in PreK, K and maybe 1st grade in the first semester. A word wall can be a broad term that can include multiple ways of highlighting words in the classroom. They can be used to highlight word families, word meaning, word patterns for spelling and for affixes, or even vocabulary terms students have learned. Usually when I think of word walls, one of the main focuses is either patterns, or meaning.

Another possible value is that word walls may serve as memory supports; lists of information students might need to turn to in a pinch. The use of word walls as spelling resources are an example of that, as are the manuscript and cursive alphabets that have decorated classrooms over the past couple of hundred years.

I guess the idea would be that when a student comes to a challenging word, he/she could go to the word wall, find the right combination of graphemes and examine the pictures of the articulatory apparatus in the hopes that replicating that shape would lead to proper sounding out of that word.

Each week as the kids learned vocabulary from their reading anthology, the teacher had her students determine the categories the words belonged to. They posted the words in those categories and as new words were added, they either grouped them into the existing categories or came up with new ones.

Although the teacher could use this display as part of a teaching presentation or kids could employ it as a memory aid to improve the diction of their writing, its real use was as an opportunity to socially-construct and reconstruct knowledge across a school year.

When teachers transform the word wall into a construction site that allows students to explore and demonstrate their understandings of word meanings and their relations, the result is more in line with research.

I suspect that teachers could easily develop those more productive kinds of word walls with a focus on decoding and word reading. By guiding students to build sets of words organized by spelling patterns (e.g., cone, bone, phone, tone), complete with exceptions (e.g., one, done). You might turn to Words their Way for ideas on how that might work (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 2019). Or, you could use the kinds of morphological analysis devices (word sums and work matrices) proposed by Peter Bowers since they appear to provide a useful structure for helping kids to think about word pronunciations and meanings ( -should-morphology-instruction-look-like#sthash.3N5pIOzY.dpbs).

I'm so glad you addressed this! Thank you for the suggestion to build in supports for just those words a student has trouble with. I'm having an "A-ha" moment for sure! BTW- Tim; you were my advisor at UIC many moons ago when I was applying and going thru the graduate program. I may not have truly grasped the importance of you work back than, but I sure do now!

Thanks for this question and the response! Reading adoption ( Pre-K through 5th) in our state is coming next year. Because of that, I have been doing lots of SoR study. These sound walls are being touted as being "approved" by SoR as the pathway to deep orthographic instruction.

I do have a question about the traditional word wall in the early grades. I used it as a foundation for many games we played with the words. All the students participated and added those words to their reading and writing vocabulary. We would retire words everyone had learned and celebrate our successes. I understand that this is an anecdotal observation and there were lots of other moving parts involved ( they read readers that used the words repeatedly, read lots of poetry chorally, wrote daily, and the words were included in the morning meeting message), but nearly all of my kindergartners were reading and writing by the end of the year. I feel like the

WW games helped. Is this a case of just seeing what I want to see?

Susie-

If you have objective data showing that your kids are doing well, I have no doubt that is the case. The issue that you are raising is why your kids are doing well? That is something impossible to answer (by either you or me). That's why research is so important. It can help us isolate those causes so that we can improve on our practices (including things you can't see at all -- like the home literacy environments in your community). That there is no research supporting word walls or sound walls doesn't mean they can't help, it just means we can't be sure whether they help or not. I certainly hope you did more than have kids memorize words (you don't mention any phonemic awareness support or any decoding instruction). You'd be amazed that even when kids get a fast start in kindergarten from memorizing a bunch of words and poems -- many then have great difficulty going forward since the numbers of words needed for reading increases and memorization isn't sufficient to keep up.

thanks.

tim

Thank you so much for this. On Science of Reading chat boards there is much discussion of sound walls and vowel valleys. I'm not sure we need to teach all K-1 students all of the linguistics involved. Perhaps the vowel valley should go in the teachers' lounge/workroom where professionals can discuss it; i.e, when the science teacher comes in and asks, "What's this?" it can be explained that it's science, leading to a discussion of reading instruction across the curriculum. Another thought is that, as color and number words are taught, all the words with those spelling patterns can be listed below wall charts so children expand word families.

Sound walls are meant to be an active, regular part of the daily routine around phonemic awareness and phonics. They are not really a memory aide in the way you are describing. Students are not meant to just passively reference a sound wall or not. Mary Dahlgren explicitly teaches teachers how to actively and meaningfully engage students with sound wall work every day, for just a few minutes of time, to facilitate children's learning of the phonemes and ultimately the graphemes. It's truly a teaching and learning tool. Whereas Word Walls can also be this, I agree with your statement that many teachers just have a word wall, they don't actually meaningfully USE a word wall. And many below level readers find word walls confusing and overwhelming. On a word wall, the phonemes and graphemes are not adequately represented by the 26 letters of the alphabet. But on a sound wall, we can begin to link the phonemes to their graphemes, following the order of our phonics scope and sequence, using it mindfully as a tool to support decoding and encoding. If I have to pick one over the other, I will pick Sound Walls every time. From an equity angle we are much more likely to meet the needs of more students, especially the many students who will have a hard time learning to read when we thoughtfully and intentionally incorporate sound walls into our daily routines.

Thanks for always challenging your readers. I would love to know how to integrate Ehri's findings about use of embedded mnemonics and articulatory gestures to support early reading. I see how Sound Walls came out as a response to these findings. Can you address these topics further?

I am a Kindergarten teacher and I used a word wall for 4 years. Last year I switched to a Sound Wall due to Science of Reading and it was required by the district. However, we didn't receive training on how to use a sound wall. I did follow the directions of my district and placed a sound wall in my classroom but I never placed one sight word on the wall. It didn't make sense to me on how to properly and effectively use the sound wall. This blog helped me to brainstorm a more effective way to organize words within my classroom. We use Phonics First and I haven't been able to figure out how to follow Phonic First curriculum as well as teach word families. A word family word wall would be fascinating to have.

Unlike static word walls, these strategies involve principles of constructivism, an active and social learning theory where learners build on previous knowledge and create new learning themselves. As students learn new concepts, they can define terms in real-time, make adjustments as the concepts deepen, and hang them around the classroom for others to learn from.

Still others play match games with index cards face down on a table, or encourage students to create definitions that rhyme or fit to music. In these cases, the game itself is perhaps less important than the act of engaging students to commit the terms to memory.

4. Word(s) of the day: To reinforce specific concepts, Palmieri has the class come up with a word of the day or week, depending on the duration of the lesson. Students count how often the word is used and in which contexts (e.g., in word problems, during class discussion, in small group activities).

Inspired by research she had done that suggested students need to use a word between six and 30 times to truly learn it, sixth-grade teacher Megan Kelly began picking three words to focus on for a day and reviewing the terms at the start of class. During class, she emphasizes the words herself, and asks students to use the words as many times as they can with a partner.

A sound wall is similar to a word wall, but instead of hanging up vocabulary words, this type of display in the classroom is comprised of the sounds/phonemes and letters/letter combinations that young learners will encounter as they develop their language skills.

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