69 Word Wheel
Matthew Malerba
Strategy Overview
- Helps students create words that are either real or fake, while also using a variety of different sounds at the beginning and at the end.
- Word wheels will support your students in becoming more effective communicators (Sutton, 2020).
- Students enhance their pronunciation and understanding of sounds of different letters and words as a whole.
- Exposure to the matching of specific sounds to a specific letter.
- Enhances collaboration skills and causes students to truly listen to themselves and each other.
Strategy in Action
The teacher groups the students while keeping in mind the students that communicate well with each other. The teacher will distribute premade word wheels, or simply have students build their own. Students will then take turns spinning their respective wheels and saying aloud the words that are created from that spin. They can spin both the wheel with the starting sound and the wheel with the ending sound or simply choose one to spin. The idea is to have a wide variety of potential words (real or fake) that students will be sounding out. As a bonus, students can then group these words into whether they they think they are real or fake.
Student Example
The teacher passes out word wheels to each student, Student 1 spins their wheel, it lands on a sound combination and the student reads the word at hand, Student 2 then repeats this word, both students now decide if this word is real or fake, then the entire process is repeated as Student 2 is the one spinning their wheel, students take turns until the teacher seems fit.
Related Resources
References
Sutton, K. (2020, August 3). Using vocabulary wheels | Cambridge English. World of Better Learning | Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2020/08/03/spin-it-using-vocabulary-wheels-to-widen-learners-lexical-range/
