The perplexed faces of students walking by our Grade 4 display board could not be a better affirmation of the great work happening in our classroom. The 4’s are in the middle of a read aloud of Andrew Clements’ book Frindle, and we are learning to make words “stick”.
Dictionary skills can be brought to life when students have to make up a word and create a dictionary entry of it. We are activating our schema about syllables, phonetics and alphabetical order while doing new learning regarding parts of speech, context clues, font choice, font size, and media literacy. The students are deeply engaged in learning to make their words into real words like the protagonist in Frindle does with his new name for a pen.
I came up with the Whatchamaccalit 7 years ago when I last taught grade 4. I had been reading The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell and preparing a novel study on Frindle. The idea was so organic at the time. “Invent a word” is a task that I had seen somewhere when I first developed the novel study, but I took it one step further and added the audience and media dimension. One of the curriculum expectations is for students to “create media texts for a variety of purposes.” This becomes a personalized task when the texts being created are for a word that a student makes up, gives meaning to and tries to “sell” to become real.
So much has changed since I first introduced the Whatchamacallit. The word viral is in their lingo and has become their goals. If they want their word to go viral, though, there is marketing that needs to be done. Words get added to dictionaries by their use. The students are trying so hard to use each other's words. I even made up a story that incorporated all the Whatchamacallit words.
Here are some of my Grade 4's “words”:
It’s so exciting. Students have made videos, songs and advertisements to make these words become part of their vernacular. It’s a formative learning strategy that I use called Building Outside the Blocks. I create projects to help students learn skills, become more self directed and to create a class community. This BOB (as I playfully refer to them) is something that was only meant for our classroom, but has caught the eye of a lot of other students.
“Weird but cool,” was the response of one Grade 5 student who wanted to know why they didn’t get to do a Whatchamacallit in in Grade 4. The class is having a blast and learning a lot about the process and power of making words.
Here is an excerpt from Frindle where Mrs. Granger, the protagonist's teacher, explains how words come to be:
