This week in Grade 1, students began to do more work with describing weather by exploring and using words related to weather as they inquired deeper into the central idea "Understanding how the weather words helps us to make plans."
Using Click and Clunk to Explore New Words and as a Reflection Tool
In groups facilitated by a teacher, students first engaged in a language acquisition strategy called "Click and Clunk". When engaging in this strategy, students have to make a quick decision whether they know a word or not after it is read to them by a teacher or after they attempt to read it themselves. If students know a word, they put a check or write it in the "click" column. If they do not know what a word means, they put a check or write it in the "clunk" column.
In working through this activity, students were prompted to think about what it meant to "know" a word. Could you use it in a sentence? Could you read it without a teacher? Could you draw a picture of it? Could you introduce it to your friends?
This click and clunk could then be revisited at the end of the unit in order to reflect on how much students have learned.
At this stage, teachers also began to request students to discuss which weather words they were most interested in. Students thus began to form preferences of weather conditions they wanted to inquire into. In later lessons, teachers will prompt students to form questions about these conditions.
Closed Sorts Help Build Meaning
Next, teachers gave student pairs cut out versions of these words and asked them to sort the words by matching words together. More proficient readers were matched with beginning readers to make sure that most words could be accurately decoded within student pairs. First, students were asked to match words that looked similar. This closed sort helped students notice that certain words had noun and adjective forms such as: rain/rainy; sun/sunny; fog/foggy.
The purpose of this sort was to help students begin to distinguish that different functions of language needed to accurately discuss weather "like an expert". This helped students see that in order to describe the weather, we use the adjective form of weather words, as in "It is a rainy day", but we can describe and maybe even find out about the weather condition of rain.
In order to then add meaning to these words, we asked students to shuffle words and match words that were opposites. Students then created interesting combinations that indicated their current thinking about these words.
Using Click and Clunk to Explore New Words and as a Reflection Tool
In groups facilitated by a teacher, students first engaged in a language acquisition strategy called "Click and Clunk". When engaging in this strategy, students have to make a quick decision whether they know a word or not after it is read to them by a teacher or after they attempt to read it themselves. If students know a word, they put a check or write it in the "click" column. If they do not know what a word means, they put a check or write it in the "clunk" column.
In working through this activity, students were prompted to think about what it meant to "know" a word. Could you use it in a sentence? Could you read it without a teacher? Could you draw a picture of it? Could you introduce it to your friends?
This click and clunk could then be revisited at the end of the unit in order to reflect on how much students have learned.
At this stage, teachers also began to request students to discuss which weather words they were most interested in. Students thus began to form preferences of weather conditions they wanted to inquire into. In later lessons, teachers will prompt students to form questions about these conditions.
Closed Sorts Help Build Meaning
Next, teachers gave student pairs cut out versions of these words and asked them to sort the words by matching words together. More proficient readers were matched with beginning readers to make sure that most words could be accurately decoded within student pairs. First, students were asked to match words that looked similar. This closed sort helped students notice that certain words had noun and adjective forms such as: rain/rainy; sun/sunny; fog/foggy.
The purpose of this sort was to help students begin to distinguish that different functions of language needed to accurately discuss weather "like an expert". This helped students see that in order to describe the weather, we use the adjective form of weather words, as in "It is a rainy day", but we can describe and maybe even find out about the weather condition of rain.
In order to then add meaning to these words, we asked students to shuffle words and match words that were opposites. Students then created interesting combinations that indicated their current thinking about these words.
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| These two students showed they naturally grouped clouds and cloudy together, but had misread cold. They learned a lesson about focusing in on the spelling. |
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| These students associated foggy with cold, rain with wet, dry with hot. They also made plain they were not sure what the meaning of humid is. |
As the vocabulary students use for the unit grows in complexity, they will do future sorts for meaning. For example, students may sort weather words into the following groups: tools to measure weather, weather disasters, words to describe weather, etc.
Future learning climate in Grade 1?
Cognitive academic language proficiency with a chance of weather research!
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