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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Loving this idea!
I recently printed out some sheets of letters and numbers for my four year old to cut and paste with. He has just become letter and word crazy and he would love this idea too!
well adding paste to anything is fun – that and tape. My daughter got hold of the duct tape and went crazy in her bedroom with duct tape and scissors. It will stay forever until I repaint. LOL. Maybe a word collage with his words and paste? 🙂
What a fabulous idea, and the text of magazines titles is so colourful and appealing, and a great way of learning about different fonts.
Love this idea. I am pinning it to do when my son can read a little better. Wish I had thought of this idea when I was teaching. This would’ve been so fun to have done with my students!
I haven’t read Max’s Words yet, so I will have to add it to our “must read” list!
Max’s Words is such a perfect book to read if you do a word collection! What fun! Love it!!!
I like the idea of journals too. We tried the magnetic words but now our fridge is stainless steel so it doesn’t stick. My kids, though, didn’t really use the magnetic word poetry set. Maybe for older kids??
I think it depends on the kid – we have these magnetic words and phrases that are different colors for subject / predicate and JJ plays and reads them all the time. AJ has never shown the slightest interest in them. Go figure.
what a cool idea!!!