Word Trees

I actually had a pretty enjoyable day with my students today. I didn't have any behavior problems, but that's probably because they were all entertained with markers. I love arts and crafts, and coloring so I look for any and all opportunities to do art projects in my classroom. Plus, I like to decorate my classroom and the hallway with pretty, colorful things.

More importantly, I have my students for 90 minutes at a time and their attention span is about 15 minutes long. Forcing them to sit and read or write for 90 minutes straight is not just torture for them, but for me as well. They will be productive for about 15 minutes and then they starting causing drama, making stupid noises or getting up to throw away trash about 40 times. When I turn their work into an art project, they are much more excited to focus on the task at hand and the 90 minutes just flies by.

Since we only have 20 school days until the FCAT, I have been working non-stop on FCAT skills with my kids. However, I don't mention that what we are doing will help them on the FCAT until the end of the lesson because as soon as I mention that something we are doing has to do with the FCAT then they immediately do not want to do it. The biggest thing that my students struggle with on the FCAT is vocabulary, simply because they do not have very well-developed vocabularies. It would be impossible to cram my students full of a massive number of vocabulary words before the test, so I have to take the approach of equipping them with tools that they can use to break apart and figure out unknown vocabulary.

Today, we were working on prefixes and suffixes. I broke the kids up into groups and gave each group a prefix or suffix to work with. They had to use their assigned prefix or suffix to create a word tree (see pictures below). On a word tree, students have to write their prefix or suffix on the trunk of the tree, along with the definition of that prefix or suffix. Then they have to fill the branches of the tree with words that contain that prefix or suffix.

My students really enjoyed drawing and decorating their trees and they were excited to take on the challenge of trying to come up with as many words as they could using their prefix or suffix. I am going to hang these word trees up in my section of the hallway, so that everyone can review their prefixes and suffixes on the way to their next class! Here are some of the finished products: