The remaining 20-25 minutes of words time is given to an activity which helps children learn spelling patterns. A variety of activities are included in this block each day the most popular of which is Making Words. Making Words is an active, hands-on, manipulative activity in which children learn how to look for patterns in words and how changing just one letter or where to put a letter changes the whole word. The children are given the six to eight letters that will form the final word. They then sort the words according to a variety of patterns including beginning sounds, rhymes and endings and use words sorted to read and spell words with similar patterns.
Word wall is practiced every day but the second activity varies.
All the activities in the Words Block are designed to be multilevel. Across each activity, there is something for children to learn regardless of whether they are struggling or accelerated. But what they are doing externally may not reveal what they are processing internally Imagine that the five new words added to the wall one week were come, where, they, boy, friend. During the daily word-wall practice, the children who have already learned to read them are learning to spell them. Other children, however, who require lots of practice with words, are learning to read them.