Game: Erase The Face (AKA 'Hangman')

All Ages

10-20 minutes

Best for individual students or small groups.

Hangman has been a go-to activity in any class I've led. I used it with middle schoolers and middle-aged housewives in Japan, it was invaluable in my one-on-one tutoring sessions with struggling sixth graders, and my current groups of seven and eight year olds can't get enough of it.

Come to think of it, I don't know anyone who isn't at least a little fond of Hangman. Heck, the US's longest-running game show is basically Hangman with a wheel.

I only have one problem: I think there might be something slightly wrong about drawing an execution scene step-by-step in front of groups of children. Read this guide to setting up the game from Wikipedia and tell me it doesn't creep you out a bit:

The exact nature of the diagram differs; some players draw the gallows before play and draw parts of the man's body (traditionally the head, then the torso, then the left arm, then the right arm, then the left leg, then the right leg). Some players begin with no diagram at all, and drawing the individual elements of the gallows as part of the game, effectively giving the guessing players more chances. The amount of detail on the man can also vary, affecting the number of chances. Many players include a face on the head, either all at once or one feature at a time.

In my classroom, I've replaced the body and gallows with an obnoxious smiley face. My kids literally beg me to play this game. I can put it on the agenda every and guarantee myself at least twenty minutes, of

happy, focused students. Here's how we play. (January '10 Update: Click Here for Erase the Face CrossWord Edition)

Materials

All you need is a writing utensil and surface. Since I'm working with small groups of students, I use my whiteboard. This could easily be done with paper and pencil, of course.

Directions

Draw a face on the board. Clumsy artists are welcome. Include as many facial features as you like; the more you include, the more guesses your students have.

I like to write the entire alphabet on the board. This way, the students have an easy letter bank to choose

from. I found that some students took forever to search their brains for a letter. This speeds up the process.

Technically, when the face is gone before the word has been solved, the game is over. But I never beat my students at this game; I will draw it out while they guess more letters. It's fun to watch them figure it out, and it gives them more practice.

When I erase part of the face, I ask my younger students to pretend like they are erasing theirs as well. Much giggling ensues.

Benefits

I think this game has a lot going for it. It is a great way to reinforce vocabulary. I use it in conjunction with my "Word Wall," which has the 100 most frequently-used words Velcroed to it. My students have spent hours studying this board as a result. You could do this for new vocabulary from a textbook or a story just as easily.

Furthermore, I think that this game teaches some essential word-solving skills. The students really want to know what that word is, and as they try to figure it out they are compelled to imagine what sounds and letter would fit with the ones already guessed. It's kind of like sounding out words in reverse.

As the year has gone on, students have become increasingly capable of running this game by themselves. They take turns picking a word, drawing a face, and eliciting guesses from their classmates. I can pull students out for one-on-one time or just sit back and enjoy the show.

Game: Construct - A - Word

All Ages

5-15 minutes

Best for individual students or small groups.

Construct-a-Word is meant to bolster phonemic awareness by way of Analogy Phonics, which the National Reading Panel defines as "teaching students unfamiliar words by analogy to known words." It also strengthens PA by giving students repeated opportunities to manipulate onset and rime.

Materials

Post-It Notes, marker or pen, notebook

I stole this idea from the online game that I featured here last spring. I was working with a 5th Grader who needed some help with her basics, but we did not have Internet access, so I converted the game to Post-its. It turned out quite well; the Post-its are colorful, inexpensive, portable, and good for use on almost any surface, be it a table top or a whiteboard. If you do not have Post-its at hand, you could substitute index cards.

Directions

On individual Post-its, write each letter of the alphabet and the phonemes "ch," "bl,""sl,""dr,""cl,"and "sh." Using a different color of Post-it, if possible, write the endings "ig,""ot,""ed,""et,""in,""un,""op,""an," and "at." You can add or substitute any other endings you like. When finished, the complete set should look something like this:

Your student should be intrigued about the colorful array of letters in front of her. Invite her to select an ending from on the yellow Post-its. Tell her that her challenge is to use the other Post-its to make as many real words as she can. When she finds one, invite her to set the onset letter aside and write the word in a notebook.

When there are real words left on the board that the student does not see, I suggest providing clues and, eventually, pointing out the new word and encouraging the student to practice and writing it down.

Benefits

This game bolsters phonemic awareness by compelling a student to practice joining sounds together to make new words. It will also introduce or solidify the concept that words have a beginning and an end, which is a bedrock concept in PA.

This is also a good game for basic vocabulary.

There will inevitably be errors made and a few words that the student does not know. Both the errors and the new words have as much or more value than the correct answers. Even erroneous answers compel our student to practice joining an onset and a rime, strengthening phonemic awareness.

Strategy: Book Tour

A few months ago, I wrote about a presentation I gave to a class full of teachers in the Twin Cities area. They were mostly Math and Science teachers who were hoping to learn how to include literacy strategies in their classrooms. I invited them to share what they learned with Literacy Log, and got one great response. I highly recommend a look at Emily Kjesbo-Johnson's literacy strategies site for Math teachers. Today, I'll talk about just one of the strategies she includes.

Book Tour

10-30 minutes.

Any age level.

I have seen variations of this strategy before, but Emily describes it very well here. She includes a downloadable version of the handout she used.

Directions

The Book Tour is meant to introduce students to a textbook or any other new reading material. According to Emily, "it can be a worksheet that groups work on together, or a tour of the book's features led by the teacher."

Be sure to compel your students to find the most important sections of the book. For a textbook, this would include the Table of Contents, Chapter Review section, the Index, and nowadays a website.

Benefits

Think of this as part of an extended version of the KWL strategy. The Book Tour will help your students assess what they know and what they want to know about the subject matter covered in the book. It will also make the book much less intimidating.

Just before the school year began, Emily wrote about why she would start the year off with a Book Tour. "Our math textbooks are loaded with many helpful resources," she wrote, "but students are often so intimidated by the book that they never look past the practice problems."

Recently, I asked Emily how it went, and she was pleased with the results. "I think that as students went through it, they saw how the book wasn't just an intimidating giant book, but could be a valuable resource for their work during the year," she said.

Variations

The Alphabet Words game I featured yesterday could be used as a component of a Book Tour. It might be especially useful for introducing students to the Index or Glossary.

Photo: "Middle School Textbooks" by Flickr user "herzogbr." Thanks!

Game: Alphabet Words

10-15 minutes

I found "Alphabet Words" in Peggy Kaye's fantastic Games For Reading: Playful Ways to Help Your Child Read. It is incredibly simple to implement and I have been pleasantly surprised by how much my students enjoy it.

Directions
Simply write each letter of the alphabet on the board and tell your student(s) that the goal of this game is to think of a word for every letter. When you have them all, invite the students to repeat the words after you to review. That's it. The final product will look something like this:


This was the result of our Dictionary Alphabet Words game. As you can see, students come up with some strange words. Since this was a group of first and second graders, we were not striving for comprehension of words such as "helenistic." Simply compelling the students to look through the dictionary and spell new words is enough for me.

This game can be done in small groups or with an individual student. With a group, I assign each student a letter, which maintains a bit of order and gives them time to think. With five students, for example, the first will have A and the last will have E. Once we've filled in those blanks, I assign F through J.

Variations
It is easy to think of variations for this game. The first time I used it, we just thought of any old word for each letter. A week later, I included it in my "Introduction to Dictionaries" lesson. With a dictionary in hand, students had to find an interesting word for each letter. I was delighted by the way this game motivated them to dig into their dictionaries and by how excited they were by the strange words they found.

Kaye recommends the use of categories for this game. For example, you might set out to find an animal name or a food that begins with each letter. This might also be useful as a review for a particular subject or book for older kids. For example, challenging your students to think of alphabet words related to Charlotte's Web or American History might help them review the material and provide cues for recall later on.

Benefits
This is a great way to build vocabulary. It also can help with phonemic awareness and strengthen skill with specific letter sounds. As I mentioned, it could also be a way to review material and build comprehension. Additionally, as mentioned, I have used it to introduce students to their dictionaries.

Strategy: Morning Message

Here's a little metacognition from Jack Woodson at Learn Me Good, who shares year-end "Five Ways To Improve My Class." The most interesting for our purposes here is #4:

Do the "Morning Message" more frequently
This was my first year (7 months, actually) of teaching language arts. So it took me a while to get my feet under me and find out what I was doing. OK, who am I kidding, I'm STILL trying to find out what I should be doing! But one of the things I would do about once a week or once every 2 weeks was the Morning Message. This was a short passage -- 2 or 3 sentences -- filled with grammatical and punctuational mistakes. The kids had to copy it down exactly as it appeared on the board and then make the necessary corrections. It was a fun exercise, it helped the kids recognize mistakes, and it showed them part of the editing process. Next year, maybe I'll up it to 2 or 3 times a week.

Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. We want our students to be able to recognize and correct their own mistakes. Peer editing and review teacher corrections are useful toward this end, but doing a bit of guided practice can't hurt.

(Photo from Flickr user, Nic's Events. "Editing a Paper- 19")

Schott's Vocab Blog - New York Times

Lovers of words, especially newly-coined words, will love Schott's Vocab on the New York Times website. Ben Schott is an author living in London. He calls his blog a "repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles. "

Schott's entry on the word "amortality" is a good example. Think about what it might mean before you check.

If you like this kind of thing, you'll enjoy Erin McKean's TED talk about the future of dictionaries.

If you're talking about dictionaries to students and getting blank stares in return, try talking about some of the word that are being added to dictionaries. People tend to find this stuff interesting. Here's a link to a good search for "added to the dictionary." Bling bling: in or out? Pick a side!

Strategy and Web Resource: Construct A Word

Read Write Think offers a free, online game called Construct A Word. It is intended to bolster phonemic awareness by giving students practice with onset and rime. I found myself playing this game for about 15 minutes after I discovered it. Try it out!

This game could be adapted for environments where Internet access is not available. A teacher would simply need to write the onsets and rimes on 3x5 cards and ask students to match them up and say the words they have created.

Strategy: Word Sort

This is a simple vocabulary strategy that can be used in any subject and at any grade level.

Gives students a list of vocabulary words. Provide three or four basic categories and ask students to place each word in one of them.

People like to find patterns in assortments of things; it's a basic part of how our minds work. As such, this activity is intrinsically rewarding. It is also a great way to help students solidify their understanding of important concepts.

Florida Online Reading and Professional Development featured word sorts as their Reading Strategy of the Month. Their page offers a few examples of how this strategy can be put to use.

Strategy: The Imposter

The Imposter strategy engages students in text which contains contradictory statements or factual errors. It was created by Michael J. Curran and Elizabeth C. Smith and featured in The Journal Of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (subscription required.)

This strategy can be adapted to any subject for students of any reading level. It teaches students deep-reading skills as well as an awareness that text is not always factually sound.

Depending on the level of students involved, a teacher might prepare her own statements for scrutiny by students or ask students to craft their own imperfect statements to share with others.

The recently-featured site AllAboutExplorers.com is built on a very similar concept.

Strategy: 100 Favorite Words

This is a simple idea that can be implemented in any type of classroom. Challenge students to make a list of their 100 favorite words. It can be completed over the course of a quarter or a whole year, and students can be encouraged to include words they learned in your class.

100 Favorite Words is a simple way to incorporate literacy into any subject matter and to build vocabulary. In addition, it can encourage students to further explore key concepts. A student of history might add emancipation, defenestration, or inalienable to their list, for example.

If this sounds like fun to you, check out this list of people's favorite words. And this one.

Strategy: Making Predications

If you've ever read to children, you've probably found yourself asking them before you turn the page, "What do you think is going to happen?" No doubt, the children were happy to respond with enthusiastic guesses about what was to come.

Dan Gilbert writes that the human brain is constantly making predictions about what is to come in the near and distant future. It is no surprise that nurturing this instinct in readers will help them gain a more complete understanding from the text in front of them.

This Education World page contains an example of using predictions for younger students. This site contains a treasure trove of links to other prediction lessons, including this one, a Directed Listening-Thinking Activity on Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.

Strategy: KWL

KWL is a simple literacy strategy that has quickly become a essential tool of literacy specialists. It stands for "Know, Want, Learn" and can be used to help students navigate a text.

Students start by brainstorming what they already know about the topic of the text. Then, they generate a list of things that they want to know. While reading, or while reflecting on the completed text, students make a list of things they learned.

This site from a University of Indiana course provides a good overview of KWL, as well as an example of what a completed KWL chart might look like.

KWL can easily be applied to Social Studies classes. It allows students to reflect on their understanding of an issue and focus their reading to fill gaps in understanding. Here are a few examples:

• The site learnnc.org has a great 3-lesson plan involving KWL and state history.
• The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development provides an example of a KWL chart for a lesson on the 1995 Kobe earthquake.
• This teacher has a KWL chart available for download and has added an "H" to the chart, encouraging readers to think about how they will learn more about the subject.
  

Strategy: Mad Libs Debate

Mad Libs were first published in 1958 and have been popular with children ever since. Prompted by parts of speech, players fill in a template with words of their choosing and plug them into blanks in a story. The results are often humorous, and kids have a laugh while learning about parts of speech.

This activity can be altered to help students understand many aspects of literacy. This variation is intended to help students learn how to structure an argument and cite sources to support it. If desired, a teacher could provide students with editorials or opinion columns on two sides of one issue and stage a “debate” with the results.

Start by finding opinion pieces on two different sides of an important issue, such as American Idol. In this commentary , the author argues that the popular television talent show is an "integral part of the American landscape." Here, an author contends that Idol is a grotesque freak show.

Students will read one opinion or the other and, in groups, identify items A-F on our Answer Sheet. In order to do this, they will need to know how to identify an author's main argument, understand how that argument is supported, and be able to cogently offer their own opinion on the matter.

Once the answer sheet is completed, students need only plug items A-F into their corresponding spaces on the Argument Template.

A full answer sheet might look something like this. If you put those answers into the template, you have a rudimentary persuasive argument.

As you'll see, the activity did not create a perfectly-written argument. It does not flow all that well, and it is a bit redundant. But for our purposes, that might be a good thing. This activity gives students practice in identifying authors' key arguments and forming their own. Most importantly, it gives them an introduction to how those skills can be used to cite examples in persuasive writing.

Primary Source Scavenger Hunt

This lesson is intended to strengthen students’ skills in finding and analyzing primary sources. It can be conducted over one or two class periods, depending on group size and the age of the students. It assumes that students have a basic knowledge of primary sources, including author bias.

Students choose a topic and use the internet to find the primary sources required. Using a template provided, they will analyze the point of view and possible biases of the author. Finally, student will write a brief account of the event using what they learned form their sources.
Here is an example of a scavenger hunt list:

Hurricane Katrina
o One interview of a victim of Katrina. Can be in print or video.
o Two videos of the Gulf Coast during or after the hurricane.
o A speech by a politician about the situation in New Orleans. Can be a transcript or a video.
o Five still pictures of the events of Katrina.
o Three primary sources expressing one person’s perspective on the events of Hurricane Katrina.

This exercise would be effective in strengthening basic literacy in students; it requires close readings of interviews and first-hand accounts. It is a great exercise for building historical and information literacy as well. Students will learn to examine documents critically and identify problems of bias and point of view.