Expanding Vocabulary–Falling in Love with Words

These sentence strips capture my attention whenever I walk down our fifth/sixth-grade hallway, so I finally asked Chandra Reiners to tell me about them.  Here is what she had to say:  

"We have a collection of words on our word wall that come from our reading together—words specifically selected to help us improve as writers as well as make us more articulate in life.  The sixth graders have been working hard to learn them. When they find a word wall word in their independent reading, they record it and the sentence on a sentence strip. Later they share with the class how the word is being used, substituting a synonym for it to help other students understand."

"After they'd collected quite a few sentence strips, we needed to find a way to display them.  We divvied them among the students. Using sticky notes, they added a synonym for each word wall word.  The result is a flip-up game students in my room love to play, as do students from other rooms in the hall.  Students read the sentence and try to guess what word is underneath.  Many students have turned it into a scoring game and try to beat their previous score each time they play. We are falling in love with words."