Robin Hurd

Word Walls

Have you ever wondered if you could help your child learn by what you hang on your wall? Would your child become a geography wiz is you hung a world map in the kitchen, for instance?

While the simple act of hanging things on the wall doesn’t automatically result in learning, when a word wall is available in a classroom setting and used regularly, children do learn from it.

Word walls are, as the name implies, words that are prominently displayed and used within a classroom to help children learn to read, spell, or learn new vocabulary words.

The reason why word walls are important for us to talk about is that as word walls become used in more and more settings, it may be helpful for parents to know how they are intended to work, and what some of the adaptations are that can be used to increase the benefits of word walls for children who use AAC. This was brought home to me recently as I spoke at a staff development conference for science and math teachers. Several middle school teachers were encouraged by their administrators to use word walls in their classrooms, but wanted some direction on how exactly this would work for children with disabilities, and really weren’t all that familiar with how to use a word wall in the first place.

Classic word walls

The classic word wall consists of the letters of the alphabet, with basic sight words hung beneath them throughout the year, 5 new words a week. Students interact with words on the wall to learn sight words, ABC order, phonics and spelling. These classic word walls are used as part of a four block literacy program while children are learning to read.
See http://www.wfu.edu/academics/fourblocks/block4.html for more information on word walls and the four blocks model.

Other versions of the word wall

While the word wall I just described is the tried and true version of the word wall that is familiar to most elementary teachers, word walls also are being used in many different ways in classrooms where children already know how to read. A word wall may contain important vocabulary words related to the classroom subject, which the child must learn to spell and define correctly. Word walls may include both the words and their definitions, which students must manipulate to correctly define the vocabulary words. A word wall may contain “million dollar words”, which a child may use to replace more basic words to make their writing more interesting. Or, a word wall may include words that are commonly misspelled or misused, such as “their/there/they’re”. Many of these newer uses of word walls are being done in middle school classrooms, where word walls have traditionally not been used. For more on these other types of word walls, see: http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/profdev/profdev086.shtml

Adaptations

Word walls are intended to be used in an interactive way. Students are expected to be able to talk about, point to, manipulate and use the words in their class work. (See: http://www.theschoolbell.com/Links/word_walls/words.html to get a feel for how a typical teacher may use word walls in the classroom.)
Because they are intended to be interactive, word walls may require some adaptations to provide children with special needs equal opportunities to learn.

Physical accessibility

Children need to point to words on the wall. For a child in a wheelchair or with motor impairments, this may present problems. Teachers may want to supply a fly swatter or other tool to help the student reach the words, or a flashlight with colored cellophane over it may provide a “word spotlight” to shine on individual words. If the child is severely motor involved or has visual impairments, an individual word wall may need to be created that can be placed nearer the child. Such a wall can be accessed by the methods listed above, by eye gaze, or by any other method that works for the child. (Note: this should NOT replace the child’s AAC system, but simply provide access to the same word wall that other children in the classroom are using.) The individual word wall can then be moved wherever it is needed for the child to access the words when writing.

Children who are pencil impaired must also be able to put together the words in the word wall, like other children do when writing them. How best to do this will depend on the child, but needs to be discussed with the team so the child will have access to all of the learning opportunities other students do. Watching someone else is not the same as doing it yourself!

Adding symbols

In addition, symbol supports may be helpful to allow a child to tell the difference between words. For instance, simply putting “there”, “their” and “they’re” on cards does not help a student to remember when to use each of these spellings. Symbol supports may greatly help all students to understand when each word is used. Symbol supports may also improve comprehension when the word wall contains specialized vocabulary words related to the subject, for example, igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic.

The symbol supports may be a picture or combination of pictures that help indicate the meaning of the word or what the word sounds like. The symbols that are used may be from a set of symbols used for AAC, or from clip art, or may be hand drawn. The important thing is that they are meaningful to the student and connect the new word to something the child already knows.

For example, when teaching my sons to recognize the days of the week as sight words, we are using a combination of symbols to help them connect the sound of the word and what they know about that day of the week with the written word. Thursday, for example, the prefix “thurs” sounds a lot like “thirsty”. When you are thirsty, you want a drink of water, so we use a glass of water. On Thursdays, the boys have swimming lessons, so we also add a person swimming to the glass of water symbol. For the day Wednesday, the prefix “wednes” sounds like the word “when”, so we add a question mark. The question we want to ask on Wednesday is “When will the week come to and end?”

Our set of symbols for the days of the week may not be meaningful to everyone. However, you can see that adding the symbols helps to cement the new information (what the days of the week look like when written out) with some old information (what happens on each day of the week) plus some very important information about the sounds that make up the words. Making the connections between what we already know and what we need to know is what learning is all about. Adding symbols to the word walls can help to do this very effectively for children who use AAC (and may have a reduced background of experiences because of their disabilities) and for normally developing children ( who may simply learn best when the connections between what they know and what they need to learn are accentuated).

To add to the AAC system, or not?

Another important adaptation to consider for a child who uses AAC is which words from the word wall need to be on the child’s AAC system. This will vary depending on the age and skills of the child, and the purpose of the words on the word wall. When a child is unable to spell or read yet, and the classic form of the word wall is being used to teach sight words—simple words that a child is going to encounter over and over when reading early books—the words will likely be core vocabulary words that the child will also want to know in order to build simple sentences. These words should be available to the child in the AAC system. If the child is able to read and use word prediction and spelling, and the word wall is being used to increase vocabulary or teach content specific vocabulary words, then it may not be necessary to include the words on the child’s AAC system, if the student can easily access the words through spelling/word prediction.

So… back to our original thought: can what we put on our walls impact our children’s learning? If it is a word wall that the child is able to interact with on a daily basis, the answer is yes, yes, yes!

As always, e-mail your comments and questions to parents@aacinsitute.org. We love to hear from you!