One of may favorite things in my class room is my word wall. I've seen many kinds of words walls and while I love most of them, I just ADORE mine. Partly because I think it is brilliant that I have multiple grade levels on one wall. :) I do this by color coding the words. Take a look:
I start the year with an ocean them and so I used two kinds of construction paper as my ocean background. I had them laminated and alternated them to make a contrast. I feel this makes it easier for my students to identify the sections of the words. The letters are just Trend letter that have been laminated. The ocean cut outs come from DJ Inkers Ocean Bulletin Board set. As I've mentioned in previous posts, most of my room is color coded, red for Kindergarten, blue for 1st grade. At first I thought the 1st grade words would get lost in all the blue green of the background but this color blue has enough contrast they seem to pop. The red stands out a lot, but that is also good for my Kinder Kids who are experiencing the word wall for the first time.
I start the year with their names and add their HFW weekly. I do want to mention that I do not add the words until the end of the week. We first study our words and keep them in our class fish. (see picture below)
I am sure you have noticed that all of our words are laminated. Long ago, I used to write the words on sentence strips and put those on my word walls. Well, that was when I had a much larger room and had much more space for my word wall.
Here is a picture of the classroom I had 5 years ago in FL and taught first grade. If you look close the word wall is on the far left on yellow butcher paper.
One things I did not like about that system was that I always made a new set of words yearly. I always felt wasteful at the end of the year trashing those words. Also, at times I even got behind on adding the words to my word wall... yikes. I always felt like I was letting my students down because they could not depend on me being consistent with the weekly words. With this system they are already done. (More on that in a bit)
When I moved into my current space, I wanted to revamp my word wall system and also had to figure out a condensed version of a word wall. That is when I thought of this:
I thought to my self, if I can get all the words in on a sheet of construction paper this might actually work. Then came the task of making words large enough for students to see from their desk, but small enough to fit in the construction size paper. At first I felt that the black Trend letter were too large, but they seem work now. I only struggle with the very popular letters like a, m, s and t. Then I get creative. :)
I keep all my words sorted by week. I write the theme and week they belong to right in the front of the envelope, ie: Theme 1 week1, in envelops. These envelops are kept in a box.This is my "Word Wall Words Box." Every Monday I just go in to my box and pull out the corresponding envelope. Then that envelope gets sorted to the back of the box. Side note: I do have two different kinds of envelopes to distinguish between Kinder and first. I wish I had a picture of this for you, but I did not have the foresight to take one before I packed everything up. :(
All I have to do as I take down my word wall, is to put the words in the right envelope. One of the tasks I am assigning myself this summer is to write all the words on the front of the envelopes so that I do not have to refer to my long term plans to know which words go in which envelope.
There are several types of words walls I like but can't do. First, it the interactive word walls.
These word walls are low enough for students to go get words from the wall and take them back to their seats, write the word and then take it back to the wall. I can't do this because my board is too high for my students. However I have done a
Fancy Word interactive board.
I adore this little project because I love seeing the students getting out of their seats and actively learning new words, as they use the board.
I've also seen word walls that start out with ALL the words on the wall in one color. Once the students learn the words the teacher changes out that word for the same word in a different color. This is a good word wall for rooms with a lot of differentiation going on. More advanced students can also use the word wall and don't have to rely on the pacing of the class. I liked this idea a lot at first, but it would not work for my word wall. I think if I add another color to the wall it would get overwhelming. Unfortunately I could not find a picture of this kind of word wall
I hope this helped you, in one way or another. I always say, even if you have a bad example, you have learned what you DON'T want to do.
Here I go, my first linky part. Here is your bit. What kind word wall do you have in your room?
