~time and my black Sharpie will tell~

It was an idea, born of necessity and began with a couple of words that turned into a challenge. From there it took off to a place where I never realized that it might go.

I love words, both the reading of them and the writing of them too.  Words and their meaning are interesting to me and playing with them has always been a pastime and hobby of mine.  As an educator I know that knowledge of vocabulary is a critical ingredient in the recipe for becoming a successful reader.  I have found over the course of more than 4 decades now that children sometimes have huge vocabularies of words to call upon while others, through no fault of their own, are sorely lacking.  

It is what it is.  

I cannot even recall the exact circumstances in which our classroom decided to challenge ourselves to a contest.  We set upon our fifth grade group the lofty goal of coming up with 1,000 new vocabulary words by the first day of December this year.  It might have had something to do with the word appendix when one day I described to the kids that my little sister Cindy had her appendix removed when she was only a fifth grader.  As I wrote that word appendix on our lined chart paper, I realized that the words appendectomy and appendicitis would also be related to it and interesting to comment about.  

The seed that would spawn the 1,000 words project was planted that day with a word which names a body part (appendix) that none of us even think about until it becomes inflamed (appendicitis) and needs to be removed (appendectomy).  If you are fortunate, you get it out before it ruptures and makes you deathly ill.

For the past three weeks, the kids and I have been hard at it.  It has been rewarding to me as a teacher to find children with a sticky note by their side as they read from a classroom text or library book, writing down every word they believe to be interesting or unknown to them.  Each day we try to devote 10-15 minutes of our spare time to recording them on chart paper.  Originally we had thought to display them in our classroom, but then we made the decision to hang them in the hallways for everyone to see and learn from.  

This word project has also given parents and other family members as well as a group of Kansas friends who are writing buddies to my students the chance to be engaged in our learning as well.  I've gotten many messages from adults who decided to take an active part in this process of developing a more extensive vocabulary.  I'm finding out that I'm not the only person who loves words and the manipulation of them into other members of a word family.  It does my heart good to see that type of interest from adults who at one time were fifth graders themselves.  

It's called parent and community involvement.

Little by little, the word charts are being displayed in the hallways around our classroom.  People notice them and I hope that they learn from them.  More than once, I have been asked by an adult the very same question.

"Do you really think that your kids will remember the meanings of all 1,000 words?"

My response to them is always the same.

"No, I don't.  But even if they learn and remember only 10% of them, that will be 100 words that they didn't know the meaning of before."

We plan to keep going on until December 1st and I have this crazy feeling that we might have sold ourselves short on the amount of words that we will be able to come up with.  

Time and my black Sharpie will tell.

 ~a series of letters that when strung together in the right order make sense~