I have been doing a lot of reteaching and reviewing to cram for the upcoming testing month. This has also helped with differentiating independent work in reading centers. Last week I tried to have the students type up their word family lists in a Word doc, then copy and paste them into Wordle. Not a surprise when my heterogeneous groups bombed at this task. So this week, I pulled out some "Centers Captains" (aka grade level students) to have a private training with Wordle and how I wanted this center to work. Alas, success!
My students took their writing journals to the computers center (yes! I finally have enough computers for a center!) and typed up the word lists we had brainstormed during whole group. When they had finished the Centers Captain helped them print their sheets. As predicted, this ended up being me jumping up from guided reading to help them all print- but still worth it.
During writing the students took their Wordle print outs and highlighted them according to short vowel families and long vowel families. They used a different color highlighter to represent the different vowel word lists. Short vowels proved to be easy (since we've covered them for so long) but long vowel lists were confusing and proved to be a difficult for the students (as you will see one is not very well color coordinated).
I am going to attempt to try this activity with the phonics standard each week. It proved to be fun, but less independent than I would have liked. We'll keep trying, practice makes perfect!
