Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Mem Fox Vocabulary

Standard-based bulletin boards are up this week and Meredy Mackiewicz showed the work her class has been doing with the America's Choice Mem Fox Vocabulary Study.

From Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge the students worked on the words admire, precious, errand, memory, favorite, and speckled. One of the culminating activities for this group of words was to give each child one of the words and ask them to use the word in a sentence and then draw a picture of the sentence on the back of the paper. The sentence/ pictures for each word were grouped together and hung as mobiles in the room. In the bulletin board example the child wrote the sentence, I saw a speckled fish with dots.

In Possum Magic the children studied adventure, nibble, invisible, visible, expectantly, and miserable. Each student was given one of the words and asked to write examples in their Australian shaped word web. In the bulletin board example the student showed understanding of the word adventure by listing haunted house, climbing a mountain, going on a boat, and going on a roller coaster! Great adventures!


From Tough Borris, the first graders learned stern, scruffy, massive, fearless, sorrow and greedy. Each child was given a word and then asked to complete a word web of words that meant the same. On the example shown, the word was massive. The student showed she understood the word by adding big, heavy, large, enormous, jumbo size and 10,000 pounds to his web.




Koala Lou featured the words fling, spectator, preparations, exuberant, determined, and splendid. The photos show the children acting out the words.






As you can see, the children have studied sophisticated words through their study of Mem Fox books. The activities shown are the culminating activities to show that the children understand the vocabulary and how they were used in Mem Fox's books. The real understanding of course, will be if the students understand the words as they hear them in other books or in conversation and if they use the words in their writing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mem Fox is my hero!