Thursday, September 28, 2006

Do you know what the longest word in the dictionary is?

In case you didn't, it's ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM. That's right. All of my seventh graders can tell you that, yo. And they can spell it for you and they can define it. This is no closer to getting them to pass TAKS, but hell if I care. They were motivated today. They cared and they learned prefixes and suffixes. And they were proud of themselves. PROUD. My kids were proud. Yes!

Yesterday when I closed my lesson out I asked my kids to go home and see if they could figure out what the longest word in the English dictionary was. They all came in today no closer to knowing what the word was. I set them to work on silent reading and while they were doing that I spotted a note. I'm getting really good at this note spotting game. I can even get to them before they can shove in their pocket or ball it up. So I got over and grabbed the note. I thought I was going to get something really juicy because I took it from the class gossip, instead I found a four person argument going on about what the longest word in the dictionary was. When I looked over at that part of the room I saw that three kids were reading the dictionary instead of their silent reading books. As a teacher, this makes me do cartwheels inside. They aren't passing notes about how stupid this girl is or that girl or who is hooking up with who, they're passing notes about the dictionary.

I acted out vocab words for my kids today too. They think I'm a freak, but I don't care. It was so great.

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