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arrowDo you have an idea for the developers of Word Generation?
If so, tell us about it!.

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Below, we post curriculum items and work samples contributed by Word Generation teachers.
To submit an item, please email it to Matt Ellinger at mellinger@serpinstitute.org along with your name, grade level, location, and brief description of how the item connects to Word Generation.

Please also consider joining the Word Generation User Group
         
Teacher Grade Location Description Download/Link
Connie Hendrix 6-8 San Francisco, CA My class is called media arts. Students are learning a range of media arts skills while creating the vocabulary podcasts to be used by the rest of the school for review and study. link to podcasts
Patrick Hurley 9-12 Mountain View, CA This is a presentation I gave at a yearly gathering of ELA teachers in our partner districts (two elementary districts that feed into one high school district). We get together to assess student writing samples in the morning and in the afternoon we offer P.D. I noticed that the students with papers on the low end of the rubric often lacked the general academic vocabulary that is emphasized in Word Generation. We call them the mortar words, and the content-specific words we call bricks. The powerpoint includes a count of the academic words in our benchmark papers. This led me to believe that we need to be more mindful of teaching the general or "mortar" vocabulary.

view presentation as webpage

download powerpoint
Josh Lawrence
MS
 Boston, MA

You can find all the uses of a set of WG words in a particular text easily using Google books. First, go to www.books.google.com and type in the name of the text. I am going to use Tangerine by Edward Bloor.

Once you have the preview of the book up, look on the right hand side and you will see "search in this book". I typed in the word "complex" and google returned the following:

Page 88: While he was gone, the Estates at East Hampton, and the Villas at Versailles, and Lake Windsor Downs, and the middle school-high school *complex* all went up ... (where complex is bolded).

I completed this with all off the word 2 words that are currently listed on the website in around five minutes, producing the list that is attached. This list could be used to help students preview target words from books they have already read, or books that they will be reading later in the year. This can also help teachers be attentive to meanings of words that they know they will encounter in text in coming weeks and months. Any other ideas?

http://books.google.com/

Word Generation words in Tangerine, by Edward Bloor - word doc
Matt Ellinger 6 San Francisco, CA The Wordsift tool gives teachers and student an immediate image showing which word occur frequently in a passage and which words are academic vocabulary. The tool also shows an entry to the visual thesaurus and provides associated images. This is a very handy and powerful tool. Wordsift tool

Wordsift demo video

Sample of Word Generation weekly passage after it is "sifted"
Claire White   Cambridge, MA

Classroom Observation Protocol for Word Generation

Main Purposes:
1.  To characterize the form(s) of delivery of Word Generation activities  
2.  To gather  information about local innovations and problems which may impact future development of  the materials

download PDF of protocol
         
         
         
         
         
         
 
Boston Public Schools
SERP and
Boston Public Schools collaborated on the development of Word Generation
  
This website was made possible by the
Leon Lowenstein
Foundation, Inc.

Who are the people who developed Word Generation? Find out!
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