Word of the Day & Sentence Stalking

Two of the activities I have been in charge of at Bellbrook is the Word of the Day and Sentence Stalking. For the Word of the Day, we introduce one new vocabulary word to students on the overhead. The image we show includes the definition, the part of speech, and a question for students to answer about the word. Instead of bogging students down with a huge list to memorize, we only have students learn one word a day, and test them over the words on Friday. However, students will be asked to remember these words for the next week and so on. If students use the vocab words in their writing, they get one point per word they use that goes towards the class score. Our three classes are in competition against one another. If students come across vocab words in their free reading and show us, they each get a point per word as well. We've already had at least three students do this.

Sentence Stalking is an activity where we teach students about grammar and the mechanics of great writing. Instead of giving students a sentence full of errors and having them correct the errors, we give students an awesome sentence from the Jerry Spinelli book we're reading to the class. The idea is to have students mimic great writing. We learn by imitation. We learn to talk, walk, play sports, cook, clean, etc., by watching and mimicking those around us. Therefore, we are hoping that students will mimic the great sentence we show each day. When the sentence is shown on the overhead, I ask students what they notice about the sentence. I encourage them to participate and that their observations cannot be wrong. Sometimes they think they have to give a genius answer. So, every day students will comment on the obvious: the capital letter at the beginning of the sentence and the period at the end. Then students will start to venture (which is one of their vocab words :) ) and comment on different things they observe such as the apostrophes, the commas, the word choice, the repetition, and the alliteration. The other day, when asked, "What makes this a sentence?", a student commented, "Because there is a subject and a predicate". I was amazed! They actually remembered what they had learned from last year. Each day it seems that students are noticing more and more details about the sentence. Sometimes we will even have students stop and use the technique the author used to write their own sentence. Oh, and this is called Sentence Stalking because students are "stalking/creeping on the sentence :)