Tuesday is Vocab day

Learning Pod is a big class, they are enthusiastic learners but all found school, everyone agrees they are very noisy. So I really appreciate our routines for learning which get us off to a good start everyday.
On Mondays and WednesdAys we read, on Thursday we have equipment check and on Fridays we write a learning log, but Tuesdays is vocab day.
We love the Chamabers Thesaurus and Dictionary on our iPods and have used them every week to improve our word level work in all kinds of writing and speaking and listening activities.
I've blogged before about our Vocab posters made on the iPods using Pages but we do other work too.
Last week we did poster work on words associated with the cold as part of our winter writing project and I have to confess it failed to yielded many interesting results. So tomorrow the stakes are raised and we are looking at this fabulous winter poem by Laurie Lee.

Christmas Landscape

Tonight the wind gnaws with teeth of glass
The jackdaw shivers in caged branches of iron
The stars have talons
There is hunger in the mouth of vole and badger
Silver agonies of breath in the nostril of the fox
Ice on the rabbit’s paw
Tonight has no moon, no food for the pilgrim
The fruit tree is bare, the rose bush a thorn
And the ground is bitter with stones
But the mole sleeps and the hedgehog lies curled in a womb of leaves
And the bean and the wheat seed hug their germs in the earth
And a stream moves under the ice
Tonight there is no moon
But a star opens like a trumpet over the dead
And tonight in a nest of ruins the blessed babe is laid
And the fir tree warms to a bloom of candles
And the child lights his lantern and stares at his tinsel toy
And our hearts and hearths smoulder with live ashes
In the blood of our grief the cold earth is suckled
In our agony the womb convulses its seed
And in the last cry of anguish
The child’s first breath is born


We will begin by underlining all the best words(wow words) and then I will ask pupils to shade the words using warm or cool colours to show words in the poem that are cold and hostile and words in the poem that are soft and warm. This should show the transition in the poem from cold to warm and yield some more interesting and varied vocabulary for our posters.

See our blog for some of our winter Vocab work and I'm hoping that if you look tomorrow there will be some even better work.

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