This begins a series of nine articles on teaching verbs to start the year. It is called the Verb Slam Activity (SVA), so named by our group member Polly Fuller, and thank you Polly.
I go into great detail in these articles. It is because the idea of starting all of our classes next year teaching verbs for fifteen minutes, though not tested, has the potential to be ranked up there with Circling with Balls (CWB) and Word Walls in terms of powerful activities that we use as staples in our daily instruction.
The reader not already familiar with CWB and Word Walls is asked to click on these links for clarification before continuing on in their reading about SVA:
Circling with Balls:
https://benslavic.com/workshop-handouts.pdf
https://benslavic.com/blog/original-purpose-of-cwb/
https://benslavic.com/blog/cwb-is-a-sport/
https://benslavic.com/blog/question-on-cwb/
There are several other articles and a few videos that go into even more detail on the topic of Circling with Balls. I recommend that the reader who is reading about CWB for the first time visit that entire category between now and the end of the summer:
https://benslavic.com/blog/category/circling-with-balls/
Word Walls:
https://benslavic.com/blog/category/word-wall
SVA is meant to replace our use of word walls. In my view it upgrades the word wall option while keeping the Circling with Balls option as is. This new idea is, in fact, a big improvement on word walls, in my opinion.
There are new people reading here, so as I stated above, I am going to stretch out the explanation of this new idea, giving lots of background information and going into great detail about what most of us know and do already, so just skip ahead if you already do all the things described below.
The bottom line is that I am suggesting replacing word walls with a Look and Discuss activity focusing on verbs to start each class at the beginning of the year so that our classes for the first three weeks of the year look like:
1. L and D focusing on verbs (15 min.)
2. CWB focusing on personalization and the Classroom Rules (30 min.)
3. Exit ticket (Quick Quiz – 5 min.)
However, to return to the importance of making all this clear to new people, the next article will begin with a kind of “review” of the word wall routine that many of us have used in past years.