Today's Classroom Activities :

Word Find

Jingle all the Way
Reading Spread out a newspaper or magazine that you are finished reading. Have your students find words that they know and mark them with a highlighter. Next, they can find words from a current spelling list. For added fun, provide a piece of construction paper and scissors for your students to create a collage of words titled, "Words I Know." For older students, give them different colored highlighters and ask for the nouns to be one color, the verbs another. Look through advertising mailers and catalogs to show them that once they know a word, they will understand it in many different places.

Vocab-u-lous Activity December Holidays
Each Vocab-u-lous! activity sheet challenges your middle-grades and high-school students to use their dictionaries to help them figure out which of nine challenging Word Bank words fits in each of the ten sentences on the Vocab-u-lous! activity sheet.

Flip-a-Chip: Examining Affixes and Roots to Build Vocabulary
In this lesson, students are introduced to the Flip-a-Chip activity and have an opportunity to build their own packets. Each packet contains word parts that are printed on poker chips. For example, the prefixes im and sup could be printed on the front and back of one chip, and the roots pose and press could be printed on the front and back of the other chip. Students write paragraphs leaving blanks for the four words that can be flipped from their chips (e.g., impose, impress, suppose, and suppress). Students then exchange their packets to see if the context clues in the paragraphs are strong enough to enable other classmates to fill in the words correctly.

Puzzlemaker is a puzzle generation tool you can use to create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more—using your own word lists.

Teach Dictionary Skills With Word Wizard
This lesson plan focuses on using the "Word Wizard Dictionary" to supplement and reinforce the basic skills needed for using a dictionary.