Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Self-selected members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List are joining
together to explore the Reading Workshop and other ideas about supporting
young adolescent readers. Juli Kendall, a reading teacher/coach in Long
Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Juli is also keeping
a weekly journal of her own Reading Workshop initiative. Find out more about
our project at our Reading Workshop homepage.
You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
Week #26
Dipping into Donovan's Jar:
New Ways to Learn Words
The Washington Post recently published a contest for readers in which they
were asked to supply alternate meanings for various words. The following
were some of the winning entries:
Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon.
Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly
answer the door in your nightie.
Gargoyle (n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.
Frisbeetarianism (n.), the belief that, when you die, your soul goes
up on the roof and gets stuck there.
These "Definitions" arrived through forwarded email, otherwise
known as electronic graffiti. The Internet makes it easier than ever to
publish -- I should know that. What great vocabulary! And not a minute too
soon. You can loose your sense of humor teaching this stuff.
We're changing how we're teaching and learning, and "change is stress."
As we attempt to discover new and exciting ways to learn words and what
they mean, I turned once more to Words,
Words, Words by Janet Allen.
Changing the way we teach is always a risk. There are always
moments when we wonder if what we have decided to do is really an improvement
over what we have been doing. Even when the evidence indicates that our
past practice has been ineffective, it is often difficult to try something
new. p. 108
Where to begin? First, come up with a brilliantly original idea. Then repeat
after me: "There is no such thing as an original idea." We picked
a short book to read, Donovan's
Word Jar by Monalisa DeGross. It's a terrific story about a boy, Donovan,
who collects words on slips of paper in a jar like other children collect
Pokemon cards or video games.
From that, we developed an idea of how to "teach" vocabulary in
a new and interactive way. As they're reading, the kids watch for words
they can read but don't understand. Then they write the word, the title
of the book, the page number and the sentence containing the word on a slip
of paper. At the end of Partner Reading, kids place their words in "The
Word Jar." At the beginning of Reading Workshop the next day, we draw
3 words, read the information on the slips, discuss them and decide what
they mean. The kids are so involved; it's been better than a game show.
Nothing new in the world!
Next come up with a clever name, like "The Word Jar." The cleverer
it is, the more likely someone else is using it. So, I shouldn't have been
surprised when I discovered the same book and almost the same idea in page
72 in Words, Words, and Words.
In There's Room for Me Here" (Allen and Gonzalez
1998) Kyle Gonzalez tells about using a "word jar" (inspired by
Monalisa DeGross's book Donovan's Word Jar) as a way to get her middle
school students to pay attention to the words they've read, seen, or heard.
This sample of words drawn from our Word Jar over two days gives an idea
of what the students are reading and the kind of words they work to understand.
Day One
Good grief! -- from Charlie Brown, p. 8
"Then, Good Grief!" Charlie said.
Embarrassed -- from Jade Green, a Ghost Story, p. 45
"Embarrassed that we were overhearing such a personal conversation
as this, we moved."
Chrysalis -- from Horrible Harry and the Dungeon, p. 1
"The chrysalis was hanging in a butterfly cage."
Day Two
Heroine -- from Locked in the Library (An Arthur Book), p. 5
"Have you ever wondered what makes a hero or a heroine?"
Deduce -- from Cam Jansen and The Mystery of the Missing Babe
Ruth Baseball, p.17
"He could track, write, decode and deduce."
Dashed -- from Dinosaurs Before Dark, p. 43
"They dashed down the hill together."
Using what we know to help ourselves, we're looking for, as Janet Allen
says, ways "word learning can be brought to a conscious level."
( p. 68) Words, Words, Words is full of ideas for word learning and
the Word Jar helps us make teaching decisions that are based on the students'
reading work.
Many of the words in our Jar end with "p;ed." So we need to
teach more about endings and tense and the effect they have, or don't have,
on meaning. Some of the words can be figured out using the context. So,
we model this using a "Think aloud" when we discuss the words
from the Jar. Specialized vocabulary, like "chrysalis," can be
learned as part of a content-based lesson.
Even so, our kids often come up, on their own, with great ways to learn
words and what they mean. Maricela's example came from her reading. She
didn't know the meaning of the underlined word but found the definition
close by in the text. That's a vocabulary building strategy.
"Rachel looked skeptical as she watched the two of them.
I learned that word-skeptical-from her. It means to question or doubt."
From Just as Long As We're Together by Judy Blume, p. 33
It's like Ambrose Bierce wrote in The
Devil's Dictionary, a collection of the barbed definitions that Bierce
began publishing in the Wasp, a weekly journal he edited in San Francisco
from 1881 to 1886.
"There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things
we don't know."
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