Word Collection Jars
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Our word collection started when JJ’s teacher read aloud Donavan’s Word Jar to her class. JJ wanted to start a word collection jar at home. Of course, I was happy to oblige!
Find a Jar
We found jars and labeled them. One of these days, we may get fancier and decorate the jars but we wanted to get right to our collecting so we left that until later.
Find Words for the Word Collection
Magazines
We began with old magazines. We looked for interesting words to cut out and keep in the word jars.
Picture Books
We found many wonderful, juicy words in the picture books we read. For example, the book King Hugo’s Huge Ego gave us about twenty words for our jar! JJ wrote down these words on slips of paper and added them to her collection.
Chapter Books
We’re reading with sticky notes to jot down favorite words, too. These words can be looked up in the dictionary and added to your word collection, too. Not only that, but it will get kids thinking metacognitively and prepare them for annotating texts later on in school.
Word Play Activities
Here are ways you can play more with words…
Get silly with tongue twisters. They’re a blast!
Or learn palindromes. These are my favorite, way more than my kids. I’m weird like that.
Try playing a word game. These can be as simple as hangman or as tricky as anagrams. We love vocabulary games like Oddly Obvious and Mad Libs: The Game, too.
Finally, make up silly words by combing two words together. My favorite made-up word of my own is snoph (sneeze + cough) but it still hasn’t caught on yet. Which is weird because we NEED that word! Right?
Our Favorite Word-Loving Books
Read books that celebrate words. Books like these…
Get the big list of our favorite picture books with juicy word choices here!
Make Your Own Parts of Speech Books
Just for fun, and maybe for when you play Mad Libs, you can use your cut-out words to make your own parts of speech books.
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How fun to have a jar of words! I LOVE IT!
Fun! I was going to write about how my teenage daughter made found poetry from her word collection, but I see you already have a link to something similar. Great minds…
Here it is anyway: http://patriciazaballos.com/how-we-homeschool/ (It’s a post on homeschooling, but you can read about my daughter’s found poetry towards the bottom.)
When I’ve worked with teen writers, I’ve found that they love collecting words. We always did it in journals, but I bet they’d like the jar idea too.
I love what you give to your kids, amazing!!!
This will be a fun addition to magnets I have on the fridge that depict emotions. I feel _____ silly, made, happy. Word jars could expand those thoughts in fun ways.
Good idea. My daughter likes making letters with words found in magazines.
It’s always nice to get one more use out of a magazine before tossing it in the recycling bin. A nice collection of word activities here, Mellissa. -heather
thanks, Heather!