Sunday, August 25, 2013

Word Ladders

One my of goals this year is to increase vocabulary skills in my classroom. I have noticed as I watch game shows like Wheel of Fortune & Jeopardy that if you have a good grasp of vocabulary you are better at solving the clues. I also noticed that some of the most popular word games like Words with Friends and Word Drop are also influenced by a strong background with vocabulary.

More and more people are watching these shows and downloading these apps. I was thinking these games could help me increase vocabulary skills in the classroom, which will help improve reading levels and writing proficiency. So, while I am going to be including some of those games into my classroom. I am also going to work on other activities that build vocabulary.

One of these activities is the Word Ladder. If you have ever been to http://www.sporcle.com you will notice an abundance of word ladder quizzes. I think that is very interesting that even as adults we like word ladders. It made me go back and pull out my word ladder books from a few years back. You may be asking what is a word ladder. If you are really interested, here is the history of the word ladder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_ladder

The word ladder basically starts with one word and that word changes by one letter at a time to become a completely new word.

CORD --- CARD ---CARE ---FARE---FATE---RATE


There are many variations of the word ladder. When we do it in class, we use the Word Ladders published by Scholastic and developed by Timothy Rasinski. I think this is the one I am currently using. It is the 4th - 6th grade book.

http://teacherexpress.scholastic.com/subject/reading/fluency/daily-word-ladders-grades-4-6-mkt9765

You can get them in different grade level ranges. They are all excellent for building vocabulary skills.
 
 
 
You can also find some activities online for word ladders.
 
 
 
 
 
I use these as part of my morning work at least twice a week. It is helping the students look at words more critically and it is exposing them to new words they have never seen. It also helps them work with synonyms, antonyms, and multiple meaning words. I think it is a great addition to my morning work. I can't wait to see them use some of the words we are learning in their writing!
 
TGT
 

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