Last summer my big project was to create a set of Do Nows (also known as bell work or warm ups) to use in my sixth grade classroom. My routine of starting class with independent reading just wasn’t settling my students down as they came into class and there were some gaps in my curriculum that I wanted to fill. I knew that I wanted to have a theme for each day of the week that would remain consistent from week to week, so my first step was to determine what those daily themes would focus on.
The previous year my project was to build up my grammar instruction, so I knew one focus of my Do Nows would be a spiral review of those writing and grammar concepts. This year I wanted to build up my vocabulary instruction, so I knew that would be another focus of my Do Nows. Finally, I wanted to also do a spiral review of literary terms. With those goals in mind, I decided on a theme for each day of the week. Monday would be defining unknown word parts, Tuesday would be sentence structure, Wednesday would be literary terms, Thursday would be writing and grammar concepts, and Friday would be word parts.
I began planning Mondays activities focused on defining unknown vocabulary by narrowing down the list of words from 100 Words Every Middle Schooler Should Know published by the American Heritage Dictionary. Each Monday a new word is presented in context (a passage from juvenile literature). I always ask students to try to define the word and then depending on the passage, I also ask them to give the context clues that helped them to determine the word’s meaning, come up with synonyms or antonyms, or discuss the word’s connotation (positive, negative, or neutral).
Tuesdays’ sentence structure activities include sentence combining and unscrambling activities, which were inspired by Don Killgallon’s Sentence Composing for Middle School. When sentence combining, students take a series of sentences and combine them into just one sentence. They can add, remove, or change words as needed. When sentence unscrambling, students arrange parts of a sentence into an order that makes sense. They can add punctuation and capitalization as needed. These activities indirectly reinforce the writing and grammar concepts I teach throughout the year, are great practice with comma usage, and are also students’ weekly favorites. All of the sentences for these activities are pulled from books I have read from my classroom library. As often as possible, I will book talk the book that the sentence comes from to get students interested in reading it.
On Wednesdays, students review literary terms in context. To create the list of terms to focus on, I combed through several years of released items from our standardized state tests. From that list, I narrowed it down to the top 21 terms so that I could cycle through each term twice. For most of the terms, students read a passage from a book from our classroom library. Like with Tuesday’s activities, this is a great way to spotlight titles to get students interested in reading them.
On Thursdays, students review writing and grammar concepts starting with the very basics, like capitalization and commonly confused words, and building up to more complex usage, like vague pronouns and inappropriate shifts in verb tense. All of the concepts are pulled from my sixth grade standards and are organized to follow the order of my instruction, which is largely based on Jeff Anderson’s ideas about simplified approach to teaching grammar in Mechanically Inclined and Everyday Editing, and is as follows:
- nouns, verbs, and adjectives,
- simple sentences
- run-ons and fragments
- compound sentences
- serial commas
- complex sentences with interrupters
- complex sentences with openers
- complex sentences with closers
- pronouns and pronoun/antecedent agreement
- subject/verb agreement
Like Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the sentences students are revising or editing are pulled from books from our classroom library.
On Fridays, we return to vocabulary to focus on word parts: prefixes, suffixes, and roots and continue building up students’ word attack skills. I used the fifth grade word part list from Words Their Way to create a set of varied of activities for practice because I knew my incoming students had not done any work with word parts in fifth grade. For more common prefixes and suffixes, I ask students to generate a list of words with that affix, mark the affix versus the base, and choose one of their words to define using the meaning of the affix which I provide. For less common word parts, I provide a list of words that appear to have a word part. Students must use the word part’s meaning, which I provide, to determine whether the word actually does connect to that word part or just shares its spelling.
The project, which I began last summer and didn’t finish until Spring Break, is finally complete. I used it throughout last school year and plan on using it again this school year.
If you still have questions about these Do Nows, you can find frequently asked questions and answers in this blog post.
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