Status of Word Quest

As I reflected on my teaching of reading and language arts, I realized that one of the places that I didn't spend enough time was direct instruction of language and vocabulary building.  It is tough because often you are leaning on a couple students with advanced vocabularies to help fill in the gaps of what kids don't know.  It can feel like it is not beneficial if the same kids are sharing the meaning of those tough words, but I am kind of coming around to the fact that it is helpful for kids to hear kids define words.

One of my goals this year is to make my students truly hunger for the meaning to the words that they read.  It may be a situation where I want them in a dictionary looking words up, it may be that I want them talking about books together to make meaning, or it may be that I want them to be better at using context to anticipate the meaning of difficult words.

Then we come to the spelling/word study conundrum.  The district went away from the traditional model for spelling because we were not seeing children apply it in their writing or outside of a test they were memorizing word in order to pass.  Many in the district have moved to following a word study program based on doing word sorts and basically still working in the old model but letting kids be in groups based on their abilities and not just "grade level" words.

I wanted to try something different and more self-directed.  I want to create something that helps kids see vowel patterns within their reading and take it over into writing their own sentences.  I wanted to create something that they could work on with families and share and talk about words.  I want kids to have ownership of their vocabularies and understand the words that they use and not just memorize them.  I am not a good speller, but I love learning and thinking about the origins of words and the Greek and Latin roots that help create words.

Word Quest is my attempt to create that love of words.  My goal for word quest is that they complete a minimum of one quest per week, but if that is an area that they want to grow then they can do more.  Word quest may evolve over the year as I see how effective we are on our next spelling inventory.  The kids seem to be excited and I am happy to see dictionaries being cracked and students excitedly sharing words they learned.  I want to create a video that walks through what I am looking for so you know how to help on word quest.  I am going to try to get that done this weekend.

The bottom line is that I only want to do work that shows a long term benefit.  I will be toying with this program until I see something that students will invest in and it will carry over into their work and help them use their vocabularies in meaningful ways.  Thank you for helping me out with the support at home if kids are bringing their quests for help.  I have seen some amazing work that I can tell was supported by a conversation with parents at home.  It really feels like a team this year and it feels good.