Use your Twitter network and get the children to compose a tweet such as #YsgolEvanJames What was the word you had most problems spelling when you were in school? or #class4Newtownprimary What word do you still find difficulty in spelling?” (ask your friends to retweet to their networks as well)
Get the children to make a list of the replies. If you have enough replies you could make a bar graph of the results.
Then instead of the standard spelling list, ask children to choose 5 (or more) of these words to learn instead.
(We did this and quite a famous sports commentator tweeted that he still got goal and gaol confused! Some of the children also tweeted back to the people whose ‘hard word’ they had learned and got some lovely encouraging replies.)
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I quite like this idea, because it brings the outside, adult world into the classroom, but in a vulnerable way because they don’t know everything either. It must be a relieve to kids that grown-ups also struggled with spelling and often still do. The only problem I see is that teachers need at least a small Twitter Network to begin with.
By the way, I always struggle with organization. For some reason I always want to write orginazation, which is really weird because in dutch it’s also ‘organisatie’
Hi Jeroen – nice to hear from you. Either you need a big network or else kids look up a load of famous people with twitter accounts and tweet them directly as in @famousperson. Even if they get 10% replies, it’s still fine. You can then supplement the list with your own networks (of not famous people in my case!). With the people you know, you obviously get a higher reply rate – especially if you ring them up and persuade them to cooperate.