Connector Words Chant to Get to Novice High

So my students were getting stuck at Novice Mid. Their writing has been so simple and repetitive, plus they’re getting a lot of simple little words confused when they’re interpreting.

Of course they’ve seen and heard these words in context in multiple different infographs and our TPRS story, at least a few dozen of times each. But these words are tricky because they’re short and not 100% one-to-one translation-wise.

I decided that I was going to set up something to include in their interactive notebooks, but what? I made a list of words that I had been asked about frequently and that I could see they clearly could have used in their project blog posts and/or IPAs and just started staring at them, figuring out how to make them stick.

And then…And then they started rhyming.

Rhyming’s good, rhyming works, I thought. It’ll give them a quick way to call up that word they’re trying to think of. But that’s not enough…

If the vocabulary needs to stick, we need Sexton’s Strategies for Vocabulary Retention. My kids have enough actions to keep straight with their Essential Verbs as is, but I could certainly add some context connections and some images, no?

So I whipped up the simple infograph you see here to introduce the song, with a visual block for each verse. But this is not what is going into their notebooks. Instead, we’re going to have the chorus at the top and a few cloze blocks–ready to be matched with images–sprouting around it (now available on TeachersPayTeachers with Powerpoint for practicing the chant!!).

In addition to the notebook page, we’ll do some Nearpod practice with the fill-in-the-blank function for each verse and probably some doodle responses where kids can come up with their OWN visual representation for each verse. THEN we can use the STUDENT images to make MORE connections by flashing them flashcard style to recall the verses with the words used in context! And THEN they can practice writing some DIFFERENT sentences!

I’ll let you know how it goes next week.