A. Word.A. Day.

If you are interested in a WOD for yourself or for students, I like this site. From it, you can receive a word a day in your email box and you can have it opened up before your students get there. I like the little word origin stories, too! Some of the words may seem too high for elementary students but they, the children, may surprise you.
Here is today's from WordSmith.org

This week's theme

People who have more than one word coined after them This
week's words

ciceronian

maudlin

Today's word inVisual Thesaurus
Mary
Magdalene by Titian

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg
maudlin
PRONUNCIATION:(MAWD-lin)
MEANING:adjective: Overly sentimental.

ETYMOLOGY:After Mary Magdalene, a Biblical character who was a follower of Jesus. In medieval art she was depicted as a penitent weeping for her sins (she washed the feet of Jesus with her tears) and her name became synonymous with tearful sentimentality.The name Magdalene means "of Magdala" in Greek and is derived after a town on the Sea of Galilee. The name Magdala, in turn, means tower in Aramaic. So here we have a word coined after a person, who was named after a place, which was named after a thing.

In an allusion to her earlier life, Mary Magdalene's name has sprouted another eponym, magdalene, meaning a reformed prostitute.

USAGE:"In this maudlin melodrama, all that was missing were the violins."Jeannette Layne-Clark; Minister on Stage; Daily Nation (Barbados); Mar 20, 2005.

Words of the Day Part 8

Elevate: (verb--School wide WOD) To lift up of make higher. "You can elevate your hand for the teacher to call on you."

Physical: (adjective--School wide WOD) Active. "We go to physical education at 10:00 on Mondays and Wednesdays."

Mysterious: (adjective--SuperKids word of the Day) Puzzling. Hard to explain. Something to make us wonder. "The historian cannot understand the mysterious inscription on the ancient tomb."

Words of the Day Part 7

Arsonist: (noun) A person who burns building on purpose. Sentence from a news story article: "Some of the California fires may have been started by arsonist." We also talked about how the suffix "ist" helps determine that this noun is a person.

Qualify: (verb) To fit by training skill or ability; trained. Terrance's sentence: "You do not qualify for this job." Obviously in different handwriting, possibly by the para on a day I was out for chemo.

Stymie: (verb) To block progress [The kids loved this word.] Christy's sentence: "He stymied her by not letting her throw the ball."

Words of the Day Part 6

The first term was a schoolwide WOD early in the school year. The second came from a current event.

Haste: Hurry; fast. "In her haste, she dropped her lunch tray.

Impromptu: (adjective) Done at the last minute without preparing. "Sarah Palin had an impromptu press conference at the airport."

Truculent: (adjective) Ready to fight or fuss. Terrance's sentence: "Christopher was my friend but now he is truculent."

Words of the Day Part 5

One day Terrance said, "I would like for opera to be the Word of the Day. I heard that word and I always wanted to know what it means." So we looked up the word and for music and movement I played Andrea Bocelli's CD for them. Terrance thought it was funny that the song was all in Italian. Of course that also meant that I had to hear children speaking and singing to each other half the morning in dramatic opera style.

The other two WODs were schoolwide from the morning announcements.

Opera: (Noun) A drama with music and all singing instead of spoken dialogue. Christy's sentence: "She went to the opera and listened to the songs."

Retain: (Verb) To keep in mind or remember. This was probably Christy's sentence before I was writing the sentence authors' names. "If you retain your math facts then you will do well in math."

Helmet: (Noun) A covering that protects the head. Terrance's sentence: "If you ride a bike you should wear a helmet."

Word of the Day: Part 3

With the first word, "calculate", Christy recalled it used in reference to her church adding a new building. That's pretty good for eight years old, isn't it? Terrance realized he'd heard the word "syllable" before in reference to reading and that his name has two syllables. The rest of that day we counted syllables in words in each content area.

Christy has developed a love for learning words with more than two syllables!

These are children who are in ESY every year to complete those old Mangold readers with piles of worksheets. I hate worksheets and so do the kids. I've suggested using other resources like this in conjunction with the old Mangold texts for braille readers as suggested by experts like Diane Wormsley, but--in the mind of this teacher-- since the idea came from me it doesn't matter what the experts say. The teacher in that class says that she has been teaching braille for 42 years and she doesn't want to change.

It doesn't matter how the kids learn. Some teachers would rather children learn the way they teach rather than the other way around. My husband likes that insanity definition for such cases. You know the one that goes, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."