Poetry Folder Detectives

We spend a lot of time on poetry in our classroom. I provides a lot of bang for the buck. I use the weekly poems to "dig out" and review nouns, verbs, word wall words, rhyming words. We have a weekly reading comprehension test using our poems as well. The students pictures above are being "Word Wall Detectives" using magnifying glasses to search for word wall words and highlight them yellow. Since we add new word wall words and new poems to our folder each week, the search never ends right back to the first poems added at the beginning of the year. Each week there are new words to find. This is a great challenge activity for early finishers too. Have fun detectives!

Weekly Word Wall Activity Sheet - posted on TPT Free

For those interested, I just posted my Weekly Word Wall Activity Sheet mentioned on a previous post at Teachers Pay Teachers. It's free. It's my first TPT freebie. Hope it works! :)

Student Desk Word Wall

Here is a picture of the student's desk word wall. It's made using 2 standard sized manila file folders. I staple them into a tri-fold. Each week the students write the new word wall words onto their own folders. I update the word wall at semester on the computer and make new copies to staple in the student folders. Each time the students are writing or taking a test, etc. they set up these word walls for help and privacy as well.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm continually trying to find ways to get everything worked in during a day, much less a week! So I created a little word wall weekly activity sheet which sits in the table bucket for the kids to work on as they have extra minutes here and there. I also included a couple of word wall games that the kids really love, but that I sometimes forget to do in the middle of everything else going on.

Word Search: I use http://www.puzzle-maker.com/cgi-bin/wswo.cgi to create the word search at the top of page one.

Mind Reader Game: The teacher thinks of a word from the word wall words from the week. (Mine are in the "parking lot.") The teacher give three clues. The first clue is always "The word I'm thinking of is in the parking lot." The students write guess 1. Then the teacher gives a second clue (number of letters, beginning sound, etc.) and the students may keep the guess the same or change their guess and record on guess 2. The third clue should make the word obvious.

Wordo Game: Students write words from the parking lot in the spaces first, then adds any words from the word wall in the remaining blanks. I keep the words on index cards and draw them out. Students who get Wordo (like Bingo) get a sticker. Easy and fun.