WPSQ Bank: What It Is & Ways to Use It
We've all utilized Word Banks to support students, but sometimes those can be linguistically limiting. I love when scaffolds can also serve as STRETCHERS. We typically say that we scaffold up for students at lower proficiency levels, but it's important to note that students of ALL proficiency levels (yes, including monolingual students) are also in need of linguistic stretching ! One easy way to provide both a scaffold AND a stretcher for students is by expanding on the idea of a word bank, and moving towards a Word-Phrase-Sentence-Question (WPSQ) Bank. Here's a simple template to demonstrate how quick this can be: How might you use this template? Here are 5 different ways! 1. Whole Class: Warm Up - Prior to watching a video or doing a mini lesson, or as a review of previous days' learning, ask students to take a moment to think about what they'd fill into this template on their own. Then ask them to partner up and share information to build on to their banks.
