Word Builders: Construction, Demolition, and Vowel Power

Get ready for a unit that is full of challenging content and yet, oh so much fun!  Students will get swept away by the excitement of an employment opportunity with BLC Construction and Demolition Company, which specializes in the building and breaking of big words. It turns out the company is short-staffed and needs to add some experienced word builders to their team. Will our second-grade team be the perfect candidates for this job? Students will need to work for the opportunity, making sure they meet the qualifications and applying for the position.  Expect lots of excitement when they "get the job" and jump headfirst into completing some projects for the company.

The first bend launches with lots of excitement when students discover a job posting from the BLC Construction and Demolition Company looking for an amazing team of word builders to tackle some exciting projects.  The job posting lays out specific qualifications for this position. The first qualification states that a word builder needs to be able to build words in big efficient parts, not one letter at a time.  The emphasis will be that there is no one right way to build a word and that writers will work with parts in all different ways.  When in doubt, the most helpful way to break a word into parts when spelling is to do so syllable by syllable and to make sure that every syllable has a vowel.  

The second bends starts off with a voicemail from BLC Construction informing students that they not only got the job they applied for, but they’ve also been selected to be a special task force in vowels and will need to create a vowel manual as a tool to help people with spelling long-vowel sounds. Across the bend, students will tackle one long vowel at a time, identifying some of the most common spellings for that vowel sound and creating word sorts with each of these spellings. One of the biggest principles students will understand in this bend is that there is some logic to the way words are spelled and that words with the same spellings can be studied to determine generalizations or “tips” to help make decisions about what spelling to try.

In Bend III, the focus shifts from spelling big words to decoding big words.  Across the bend, students will learn how to watch out for what should now be familiar long vowel patterns with vowel teams, r-controlled vowels or silent E.  The story of working for the BLC Construction and Demolition company plays through this bend as students learn about attending to vowels when decoding as a way to earn their demolition certificate from the company.  Then in the final session, the class will get one last big assignment, a request for a collection of two-minute commercials advertising the services of our class and BLC Construction.  Thinking back across all they’ve learned in the unit, students will name three big skills they now possess: spelling multisyllabic words, understanding common long-vowel spellings, and breaking big words into parts to read.