When I wrote about using Friends Behind Walls for my online reading programme, the first thing I thought of doing was playing with words. Putti loves breaking words up to make sense of them. Brouhaha = brew+haha, but has nothing to do with brewing tea or being funny. Yesterday, we thought of words like this. We thought of 'unfortunately' and 'perspective', as we hunted for humorous ideas."Is 'guin' a word?" one child asked me. Of course he wanted to do something with what a penguin is not. One idea led to another and we came to kangaroo words. I'm not good at coming up with these, but I love the idea! A kangaroo word is one that carries a synonym of itself in the word. We discussed just a handful in class - masculine contains the word male, blossom contains the word bloom, chicken contains the word hen. "I know this is difficult," I told the children, "but see if you can think … [Read more...]