9/28/05

September 2005: Welcome Back To School!

How quickly vacation time ends and school starts again! Where did the summer go? If you live in the Northeast, you didn't even have summer until well into July. Well, despite that, it is another school year with all the attending anticipations and concerns- and perhaps a lot of paperwork and conferencing.

Along with getting to know your students, you are beginning to use your classroom materials. If you're and old hand at Word Web Vocabulary, you will feel as though you're picking up where you left off last year, even though you may be using a different volume. At least, you're familiar with all of Word Web's features. I expect those of you who will be using Volume III, still very warm from its printing, will notice that students now have lines on which to write their sentences and answers to Think Links. I hope you and they find this change helpful.

Volume III continues the precedent set in the first two volumes with the web words for the first five lessons being numerical prefixes: pente-, quinque-, hex- and sex-, hept- and sept-, and octo-. Volume I began with hemi-, demi-, and semi- and continued on through mono-, uni-, bi- and di-. Volume II continued with du-, twi-, tri-, quad-, and tetra-. Volume III's Root-and-Branch words, the ones to which I assign a whole week for the study and ramifications of a "mega word," are chromo- (time), hydr- (water) and red colors.

I am always amazed at the number of words that depend on those prefixes, and I include the colors (green for Volume I, blue for Volume II) as a way of improving students' observational skills, which, in turn, I hope they will use to make their writing more colorful. As I was choosing the red colors, I had to smile as I remembered the first year I used this idea. First graders fell so in love with crimson and scarlet that I doubt to this day that they would ever describe a piece of clothing or any other object as being just plain red! Red also carries a load of interesting idioms, such as "to see red," "paint the town red," to be "in the red" and many more.

It seems to me that the more I think about words in any of Word Web's volumes, including Volume IV, which is well on its way to completion, the more words or uses for words I discover. In my next Ellie's Word, I'll ask you to update some of the words in Volumes I-III, as I keep on discovering "new words" or new uses for others, such as Volume I's pre- and post- prefixes. At the time when I wrote Volume I, there was no pre- or post- 9/11. Now they are part of our daily vocabulary.

I offer my best wishes for a great new school year. I look forward to hearing from each of you and seeing examples of students' work. And please remember that Word Web Vocabulary is not a word for a day. It's many words for a lifetime!

If you enjoyed this Ellie's Word, please feel free to forward it to another teacher. If it was forwarded to you, you may sign up below to receive every issue at no cost.

And that's my word this time. Ellie

Visit Word Web Vocabulary at the October ASCD Conference in San Francisco.
We'll see you at Booth 409!

Please contact me (elinormiller@seepub.com.com) with questions or comments. I'd love to know how you are making out with Word Web and how your students are doing!

Word Web Vocabulary - recommended on Heidi Hayes-Jacobs' website, moving vocabulary from the edge of language arts to its center