Jonathan's daily journal story was about missiles. He dictated his story to Alison, but she wasn't sure how to spell the word "missiles." Alison made a good guess, and after his story was finished, a number of us took out our Macmillan Dictionary For Children and we looked up the spelling of "missile." Alison had guessed correctly, but the dictionary gave us so much more interesting information. The definition of "missile" is "anything that is shot or thrown through the air," and the children had a great time brainstorming many other things that could be missiles.
The children then wanted to look up other words - "spaceship" was the next word that the kids wanted to look up. And then, Lucas was even interested in the extra bits of information in the dictionary, like the pronunciation guide.
Even teachers don't know everything, but we all had fun using our classroom resources.
Alison
Great story. I love how fascinated they are with the dictionary. Someone seems to be reading it almost every day. And I love how you modeled the process of what to do when you don't know how to spell and word and actually worked through that with the kids. What a great skill for them to have.
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