Sunday, September 8, 2013

Week Two TLAP style


It is possible to make students excited and have fun about prefixes, suffixes, and roots.  Are you thinking, "Yeah right"? I know I can't believe it either!  By the end of the day Friday, students wanted to make a video for YouTube about them.

To TLAP the prefix lesson, I turned it into a game.  Students were given base words and had to add prefixes.  Cheers went through the roof when I showed what they could win if they found the most valid words.


Each group member would get one of these stickers, but they shouted like I was giving them $100 bucks.  You can buy them at Smilemakers.  I've found this to be the best place for tons of great, quality stickers.

We added some rap music/lyrics to our repertoire with the Prefixes, Suffixes, and Roots Rap from Rhythm, Rhyme, Results.  I bought their entire Language Arts CD on iTunes.  They have a CD for each subject area.  The students loved reading along and then singing along on the second time.  They loved it so much that they suggested that we make a music video of it.  One student thinks we'd get a million hits on YouTube.  Right now, I have a poll on Edmodo to see how many others would want to make a video.  I'm up to 10 students so it looks like I will have a new project to start.  I will share it on here when it's complete.  I'll have to research about YouTube since I've never done this before, but it will be exciting.  

Afterwards I realized I should have worn a costume which would've been a better TLAP version.  Next time I use one of their raps, I plan to dress like Flavor Flav.  

That will really get the students and staff talking.  It will take a lot of practice because my tongue gets all tied up whenever I try to rap.  Keeping my students excited and engaged is one focus of my passion so I will do this and succeed for my students!

I like to give some variety/choice to homework when at all possible.  For the first assignment, students had to introduce themselves by using either Wordle, Blendspace, a bio-cube, or a letter.  While many chose a letter, I did have a few create Wordles, who also figured out how to share them on Edmodo.  Wohoo, for them! I had very few do the bio-cube, but I really like how a few of them turned out.


The second assignment is a brand new idea that I created this summer.  I find root words extremely boring.  I imagine most do, especially tweens.  They love fortune tellers/cootie catchers so I created one for Root Words.  They came out better than the practice one I did.  They are excited for school Monday so they can play the game I created for it.  You can purchase the assignment at my TPT store.  


Have a great week! We will be rapping, playing games, and creating word trees that I blog about at the end of the week.

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