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Developing early literacy: Assessment and teaching
Mystery word match This is a variation of the familiar ‘cloze’ type of questioning, where the children are given incomplete sentences and asked to provide the missing words. For this activity, write the incomplete sentences on a card and give each child three ‘clue’ cards for finding the mystery words. The word cards should all contain the same base word but each one should have a different inflectional ending. Children will soon discover how the inflectional endings affect the meaning of words, and they will develop automaticity in writing words with various inflectional endings. Sample mystery word matches: The people were… exciting excited excites I ran… fast fastest Cats are… walk walks walking
… down the street.
Pattern word sort This is another example of a word sort where children look for patterns in words and decide in what words ‘y’ changes to ‘i’ and in what words it remains the same. Provide the children with the initial word cards and ask them to create corresponding word cards that contain the plural or past form for sorting. Alternatively, they can write on the back of the index cards. Similar activities work well with small groups of children. carry carried story stories hurry hurried penny pennies bunny bunnies pony ponies party parties baby babies city cities family families empty emptied turkey turkeys donkey donkeys chimney chimneys
Word tree For this activity you will need to create a tree on cardboard. Select a base or root word to place on the base of the tree in the root area. Then ask children to write as many words as they can that are derived from the base word and place them on individual branches. You can continue adding new words over the course of the session or theme.