Building Your Word Wall throughout The Unit
Word wall visuals are much simpler than structured visuals. Whereas structured visuals are more detailed and layered for rich conversations, word wall visuals are simply meant to remind a student of a previous lesson featuring that visual. Word wall visuals appear in the new slide decks starting on Slide 6, and when printed out on an 8.5x11” piece of paper, should be clear and visible across the classroom.
Instead of setting up a word wall for all of a unit’s words at the start of a unit, try adding to the word wall one day at a time. If we introduce the word wall visuals with the lesson’s objectives (see Slides 4 and 5 and Tips and Tricks Volume 8), we can move those visuals to the growing word wall at the end of the day, and refer back to them when those words come up in subsequent lessons.
Personalized Student Word Walls in Interactive Notebooks
Students can have a section of their interactive notebooks where they build their own word walls as the unit progresses. This can double as a student-made glossary if students write their own definitions next to the visuals, or write out their answers to one of the guiding questions using the provided sentence stems next to the visual.
To easily provide word wall visuals for students to tape or glue into their notebooks, create a PowerPoint or Google Slides file with up to six word-wall slides on it, then adjust the printer settings to print six slides per page. These will be small enough to fit easily into students’ notebooks, and save you a lot of paper!