Jul
17
Interactive Word Wall Idea
July 17, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Greetings,
On the heels of the Sam, Come Back post, I am also going to write a short post on almost a sister/brother tag-along Notebook file that will correspond with the Writing that my students will be doing daily in the Reading Street Notebook file. It is an Interactive Word wall that will grow with the children as the year progresses. At the beginning of the year each student receives one personal desk dictionary called, “Words I Use When I Write.” I have taken this idea and applied it to a Notebook file that will keep track of all the words that will not be found in the dictionary and therefore, the children can add these new words into their own dictionary’s.
To construct the pages I simply used the Table Object shortcut at the top of the Notebook tool bar and had to reconfigure the sizes a little bit to adjust to a 5 x 5 table. Once I did that I highlighted all of the cells within the table and changed the font to my font size and type of choice. I just generally like Cooper Black for my 1st graders. From there on out it was a matter or clone the page 25 times over and switching the letter at the top of each page.
Initially I was just going to add the words to the cells, but I thought for 1st grade purposes, it might be beneficial to children to have an image to correspond to (especially at the beginning of the school year), so I figured out a way to attach text and image together and then insert them both into the cell. The image and text will automatically resize to fit the cell (thank goodness)!
Here are a couple of more examples…
If you are in need of adding a word that will go in between others, you will need to click and drag the images out of the cell and into another lower cell in the table. Then you can add the new word in the vacated spot.
I am excited to try this out this year in the classroom and I think the children will enjoy having the visual aid at the front of the room during writing time.
If you have any questions as to how to work with this particular file, please feel free to contact me.
When I post lessons like this one and in the future I will be then posting the lessons onto my Box.net Share folder that is located at this Box.Net Link and is conveniently placed at the top right hand side of this blog.
Thanks for stopping by,
Bill
