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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