I was working with a small group of fifth graders this afternoon, and we were discussing contractions and compound words.

We played a brief game in which they looked through their books to find five contractions and five compounds words.

Scott kept murmuring under his breath as he worked, “This is hard. I can’t find any contraptions. I can’t find any contraptions.”

Meanwhile when I asked James to tell me one of the compound words he’d found, he replied with, “plum meeting.”

“Plum meeting?” I said, looking perplexed.

“PLUM MEETING!” he replied - somewhat exasperated.  After all,  he HAD said it clearly the first time.

When I continued with my confused look, he declared, “It’s right here in my book,” and he held the book up for me to see.

The sentence was, “The arrow was plummeting to the ground.”

I have a lot of work ahead of me.  Contraptions and plum meetings….

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Children, Teaching/Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.