Leila's Ch. 9 Reflection

Taberski's word wall is a very clever idea! I think it is does much more thank helping students recognize words. It can also teach them spelling. As long as the word wall is up there through the school year, I have no doubt that students' would have a lot of those words down by the end of the school year. As Taberski mentioned, learning words is recursive.
Learning new words is a hard task for students. After reading this chapter, I never realized how many ways words are structured. Similar to math, we cannot just give the students a handout or tell the "thumb of rule" for finding an area of a rectangle; in this case, vowels have a long or a short sound. We have to let the students make their own connections. That is what Taberski does with her students. She had the students sort out monosyllabic words according to either their length, their common letter(s), their common sound, and their spelling pattern. She also had her students clap out the syllables. The purpose of clapping syllables helps children understand that each syllable in a polysyllabic word can be analyzed for its spelling patterns in the same way as monosyllabic words. These are just two of the many activities that she does with her students.