#word work

Erin Beers is a 7th grade ELA teacher from Cincinnati, Ohio.  Her blog at MrsBeers.com is designed to inspire ELA middle school teachers with ideas and resources for their classrom.

Here teachers will find novel units, reader's theater toolkits, and writing resources.

Erin has taught for 21 years as an upper elementary reading and language arts teacher. She is a National Board Certified Teacher in Early Adolescent English Language Arts.

Erin Beers is a 7th grade ELA teacher from Cincinnati, Ohio.  

Her blog at MrsBeers.com is designed to inspire ELA middle school teachers with ideas and resources for their classrom. Here teachers will find novel units, reader's theater toolkits, and writing resources.

Erin has taught for 21 years as an upper elementary reading and language arts teacher. She is a National Board Certified Teacher in Early Adolescent English Language Arts.

Word Work Activities for ELLs

Word study looks at spelling and phonics patterns of individual words. Word Work activities give students practice working with words. This helps them learn how to both read and spell words. For ELLs it is helpful to include pictures when possible for word work activities. This allows students to better understand the meaning of the words that they are learning how to read and spell. Word…

Word Sorts with ELLs

Word sorts are one way to help students learn spelling patterns. Students are able to focus on two or three patterns instead of trying to memorize a list of words. They are then better able to apply those spelling patterns to new words that follow a similar pattern. Here are some ways to set up word sorts with ELLs.

Small Group

The small group might be a word study group, where all of the…

Blue Around The Neck

Death and love and death and love and love and death is all there is holding flesh to bone - bone to breath - to blood.

Words splash out crash out of this inked pen.

Descriptions of ideas, perceptions.

Only known to my insides, known by no others exactly as me or I, them.

Still, communication flows, one to the other, believing that we are understood.

Misunderstood most of the time, time tells.

What was grasped or passed over?

Time tells.

Pressed into, pushed through.

Perseverance.

The constant heart beating repeating always repeating.

Until it does not.

Stoped.

Gone?

Empty?

Why always the black and white of thinking?

The have, the have nots.

What of the middle?

The middle dilutes the senses.

Kills the imagination.

The middle like bland watered down coffee, the caffeine washed away.

Filtered out the buzz.

The kick.

Kicking and screaming.

Fighting.

People fight, constantly battling not in a war but with the impulse to rise.

To climb, to achieve so-called successes.

Become Blue in the caller.

Succumbed to mindless dull labor.

For what, a few dollars to spend on consuming to keep the machine fueled.

To be held down.

Pressed, depressed by invisible hands around the throats of millions.

The 1%.

So small.

Free.

The rest paid slaves.

Working to fill our bellies, roof our heads, fill pockets but not our own, in pursuit of objects, which are supposed to make our lives better, more complete, happy whole.

Working always working 12-14 hour days, two jobs and more a day.

To simply survive, to feed the machine, to employ the wealthy with all their riches - earned off the backs of cheap labor.

Paid slaves. No rest

The option to bow out, not permitted on these premises.

We must all earn our keep.

Keep on keeping on.

Immobilized by survival, left empty after labor.

The body so depleted of energy can’t even fight or care to question.

Just    get    by,    live    then    die.