In the next couple of weeks in Australia and New Zealand, our schools will finish their summer holidays, and students and teachers will return to the classrooms. This means that lots of teachers are currently getting their resources together for the new school year ahead – including me.
For students who are conventional readers and writers, a word wall is an important classroom resource. Our job as teachers is to show them how important this resource is – but first of all we have to get it ready for them to use!
As we get the word wall ready, the first part of our planning is to consider the words that our student(s) need to learn to use. If they are at the beginning of their sight word journey, we might take a high frequency word list like the Oxford Word List and work through it. If they are further along with their word knowledge we will target just the high frequency words they don’t know. We also want to include “magic words” on the word wall – one for each of the 37 word families. Overall, we will introduce 5 words per week for the first 7 weeks of first term.
The second part of our planning is to list the words we are going to make up – and then make them up! Since colour coding is an important part of a word wall, I prefer to plan this part ahead.
Colours are important on a word wall to help us give the students’ clues when they want to locate words. If a student is looking for the word “them” we want it be on a different colour background to “then” so that we can help the student locate it. So, if I plan ahead I can make sure that words with the same word shape and length are on different colour backgrounds.
Below is my planning for the full school year, for students who are just beginning with sight words. I made this table up and then coloured the words so I could make sure that I didn’t have any colour “clashes”. I planned the whole year ahead at this point so I could ensure no clashes. The words are from the Oxford Word List and also one for each of the 37 English word families.
(Thanks to the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies for the plan of introducing words which includes the weeks for consolidation – it’s been working beautifully.)
If you want to download a PDF of this document please right click here and save it.
Once I’ve done this planning, I make up the words. In the recent past, I used to print the word and then cut it out to emphasise the word shape and length. Then I would stick it on the appropriately coloured background, laminate it and put some velcro on the back ready for use. However, the staff at Woodlands School where the wonderful Rosie Clark works, came up with the very sensible idea of making the words up in Boardmaker – with the white box to emphasise the shape and the coloured background already in place. This has made my preparation a lot easier this year – since I made up all the words in Boardmaker and then just printed and laminated them. My Boardmaker file for my week 1 words looks like this:
I love it! So much easier to print and use!! I can print them at full size for a large word wall – or reduce the size if needed. I can even print them at 20% size for use on a portable word wall and I don’t have to do all the fiddly sticking and colouring with the miniature words. Hooray!!
Full size word wall words ready to go for Term 1
Portable word wall with the words printed at 20%
To download the Boardmaker files for the word list above please right click here to download the zip file.
If I am making a large classroom word wall, I also need to create a space in my classroom with the heading letters A – Z. The word wall will then be ready to add the words each week like the example below (although it won’t have any words on it at this stage).
A classroom word wall from Willans Hill School
The word wall should be in an area where all students can see the words easily. If this isn’t possible, then I will make portable word walls for any students who need them – this might be because the word wall isn’t clear from their desk or it might be because they have a vision impairment and can’t see the wall. Or, if I have students who are at very different sight word levels in my classroom, I might also make portable word walls for each student rather than having a large classroom one. This lets me target each student’s individual needs.
If you need to make some portable word walls, the template for an A4 paper printed portable word wall is here. Or, if you are using US Letter paper, here is a great portable word wall template from Dr Gretchen Hanser when she was at the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies. This file also includes the instructions you’ll need for making it up 
And next week I’ll be back with a new post about using the word walls – because preparing the words and the word walls is only the first step – we have to use them for them to work
