subject: Educating With Wood Letters For The Wall [print this page] Wall letters, whether they are hung in your home or office, can serve both a design and practical function. In your elementary school classroom, on the other hand, wall words can serve as a great teaching tool.
Elementary school teachers can implement a word wall in their classroom to great results. A word wall, whether you use wood letters or otherwise, is a large portion of the wall with an organized list of words. You can use word walls for several teaching functions, including teaching children about high frequency words, grammar rules, the alphabet, word families, names, months of the year and much more.
The word wall should be large and visible in a way that will catch the childrens attention. Its a good idea to write words in the same ink against different colored backgrounds in order to differentiate between oft-confused words.
Wall words can allow you to teach children about word chunking. Chunking is visually brings words together that have commonalities, or that rhyme. Chunking also teaches children about common families of words.
To help children remember the meanings of different words, you can formulate a chant, song or rhyme around the word that cleverly puts the words meaning in context.
A word wall can be used to present the correct spelling of words that children use most often in their writing. You should be selective about the words to include on the word wall, making sure they are relevant to your students education. Add words regularly to the word wall, but dont overwhelm them. Add and remove different words gradually. Children should be able to learn and take about five words a week, more or less. Use your best judgment.
There are several activities you can do with your children while interacting with the word wall. For instance, you can play word bingo by making a tic-tac-toe grid and placing the words within. Each student will have different words in different spaces on their respective sheets. Instead of calling out the word outright, give them hints as to what the word is, such as Its a large animal with a long trunk found in the jungle (the answer would be elephant).
Another activity you can do with students is to teach them new words daily and have them use it in a sentence. For some extra fun, you can have your students build a fictional story around the word.
If you do not have enough room on your wall for a word wall, you can consider a display board with three panels, or displaying a large dry erase board on an easel. Not only does the display board save space, but can be moved around the room and folded up for easy storage.
Remember that there is no right or wrong way to build a word wall, so long as it performs the function of educating your students. As you build the word wall and progressively add more words for them to learn, you should assess and record your students progress.
