New Principal and Vocabulary

Today I met the new principal and had to ask how he felt about switching classes. For the last four years my fifth grade team has been switching classes. We have had a lot of success, including test scores but mostly in that our children and their parents come back and tell us how well prepared they are for middle school.

Well, his response was that he was open to it, but in the past he hasn't been a supporter of it. He said he would like to talk to us as a grade level and as individuals about it. I hope that he decides to keep things as they are. If he doesn't then I will need to learn a lot of science by August and refresh myself on math. A little part of me would be okay with not switching, a very little part of.

Regardless, I am going ahead and planning literacy. One of the big projects is a vocabulary "program" that 4th grade teachers and 5th grade teachers can use. Today our county literacy curriculum coordinator was talking to our team and I told her about it. She was very interested, so I emailed her one of the "units". I look forward to hearing back from her.

The "program" is not about learning a list of words but rather learning about how parts of words work together. Each unit is based on a root and then making words using that root with prefixes and suffixes. Students use definition clues to try and figure out words that use the root and fit into puzzles and sentences.

This past year, I used my class as guinea pigs to try out three "units". They were willing participants and told me that they really liked it. Now, this class tended to like a lot of things we did and tried so I'm not sure how reliable they were as test subjects. Anyway, within the three weeks that we did the units I noticed an increase in student involvement and students taking more risks in making words based in the roots. They would get excited when they had time to work as a group to make words, on the first day, and solve puzzles on the second and third day. By the fourth day they showed confidence as they figured out what words to use to fill in missing places in sentences. On the fifth day they were excited to share the sentences that they wrote using any of the words they learned over the previous four days.  I considered it a complete success.

So now I will spend some time making up the "units". Wish me luck!