literacy skills, teaching literacy, word skills

Literacy: fabulous fridge magnets

Trevor Millum outlines a truly novel way to get pupils to enjoy manipulating and using words

Look at the text below. What kind of sense does it make?

a a a an ancient and and and and and as at away away ballad beast beast. before black bluebirds born caged children chime clocks come cut day desperate distant dolphins down dream east echoing every eyes faded far faraway feast first flight foals for friends from from fun future geese glade gold great grey had had hadn’t head, heard hearken horn hotels hour human hunted I I in in in in invisible isle it it jade kind land learned legged light lived made man woman moonflower mountains night noble of of of off off once one or our pact pale played power purest rhyme rise river said sang saw say see seer shadow shimmering shining sight silver slay so speak spoke stole tan the the the the the the their them then there they they though time to to tourists two two-legged unicorn unicorns up up upon use was were west what when where white wild with within

This text makes very little sense unless you are familiar with fridge magnets. Even then, of course, most of our domestic fridge magnets decorating our white goods are rarely in such neat alphabetical order! There’s something special about these – and something very practical too.

‘Collapsing’ text
I was introduced to the concept of ‘collapsing’ a text into alphabetical order by a friend and fellow ‘word-nerd’, Chris Warren. It’s a technique I have used with pupils of all ages as well as adults and which works surprisingly well. Let me discuss a couple of ways in which it is useful in teaching and learning and then I will explain how you can create them yourself.

Word fun
Many children find writing a turn-off. A shame, we know, but true, especially among boys. One of the ways to show that working with words can be fun is to let them work with fridge magnets, created by collapsing a text into its constituent words, arranged in alphabetical order.

My instructions are usually restricted to ‘Make whatever you like with the words: anything you like the look of, or the sound of.’ Some create word collections that can only be described as poems, some are fascinating phrases or sentences:

desperate children caged in gold
shimmering mountains dream of shining rivers
wild unicorns played with distant dolphins

Whichever way pupils are tackling this task, they are creating meaning. Along the way, they will ask questions such as, ‘Can I add a word?’ or ‘Can I change a word?’ I usually ban additional words unless a good case can be made for one, such as a preposition. However, you may wish to integrate a little basic numeracy and declare, for example, that each new word costs 25p and each writer has only £2 to spend. On the question of changing words, I am more open. It seems a positive move, to me, if a pupil wishes to add ‘ed’ or ‘ly’ or an ‘s’ to change tense or person. Just make the rules clear – and stick to them.

The resulting pieces of writing can be left as they are, re-worked and polished, or serve as the basis for further writing. One approach I have used when running a writing workshop has been to gather a phrase or two from each pupil in each group and work them together so that each group ends up with an interesting shared piece of writing.

This activity works well on paper and on screen. The advantage of working on screen, of course, is that writers can use drag and drop to emulate the same kind of action that would be used on a real fridge door – and this appeals to some learners in particular. It also encourages pupils to try out different combinations of words and make alterations if they wish: something which is hard to develop with pen and paper.

The texts which I make use of to collapse into fridge magnets are usually poems and I vary the choice of poem to suit the audience. One of my favourites is ‘The Magic Box’ by Kit Wright, which provides a wonderful collection of words. Here is a selection:

broomstick Chinese colour corners cowboy
dinosaurs dragon electric fashioned fifth fire first fish
from gold great Gujerati high-rolling hinges horse

How to create fridge magnets
Any vocabulary-rich text will provide a good quarry of words from which to build. You might look at advertisements, travel guides or recipes, for example. Once you have your text in electronic format, by typing it out, scanning it or downloading from the internet, there is a simple process to follow using Word. There is also a tool available on the Teachit website (www.teachit.co.uk) called Cruncher, which will enable you to do the same thing.

Before you start, do two things

1. Make sure you have saved your text – just in case.

2. If you have acquired your text from the Internet, make sure it is ‘clean’.
Some texts, when copied from a website, bring with them ‘embedded’ information which can prevent the ‘collapsing’ technique from working properly. ‘Paste Special’ sometimes removes these, but to be sure, paste your text into Notepad (find it in All Programs > Accessories > Notepad) rather than Word. Then copy it from Notepad into Word and it will be fine. Notepad acts like a sieve and removes unwanted items.

Now you are going to use the Find and Replace tool, which you will see in the Edit menu.

Type a space in the ‘Find what:’ box.

Type a ^p in the ‘Replace with:’ box. The ^ (or circumflex) is above the number 6 on your keyboard. Make sure the p is lower case.

Now click on ‘Replace All’. This should put the text into a long thin column, which you can then sort alphabetically. To do this, go to the Table menu and select ‘Sort’. Ignore everything except the OK button. Click OK and your list of words will be put into alphabetical order. This is a useful tool to know about for other occasions, too.

Next, go back to the Find and Replace tool and reverse your previous instructions. That is, type ^p in the top box (making sure that you do not inadvertently leave a space there too) and type a space (or several if you wish to spread the words out a bit) in the lower box. Click on ‘Replace All’. This should put your words into a neat block.

If you wish to remove capital letters, you can use Format > Change case to put all of the words into lower case. There is a neat alternative (Shift + F3) which cycles between capitals, lower case and sentence case. To finish the tidying up of the text, use Find and Replace to remove full stops, commas etc. You may wish to delete duplicate words and allow pupils to use each word as many times as they like – or leave duplicates in the collection. When you are satisfied with your collection of magnets, save your work with a new filename.

Different text types
There are other ways in which you can use fridge magnets. They can be used as a more interesting way of looking at different text types. Create half a dozen banks of fridge magnets drawn from different text types, e.g. a poem, a story, an advert, a news item, a recipe, an estate agent’s description. See if pupils can guess which is which. Which words give them the clues? What kinds of words are absent from different kinds of texts? (Look out for pronouns, for instance.) This kind of puzzle-based investigation is more involving than listing the four or five characteristics of information texts!

Sorting activities
Another use for fridge magnets is in a word sorting activity. Make a table underneath the word bank and label the columns to suit your focus for the lesson. It might be adjectives, verbs, nouns, pronouns etc; it might be something more abstract but more interesting: happy words, sad words, exciting words and so on. Whatever the categories, words can then be dragged from the bank into the appropriate column. If a word could be both an adjective and a noun, for example, it can go into both columns. Then, when the original text is displayed, you can see which it is. This makes a good activity for individuals or pairs, which can then be shared very effectively using an interactive whiteboard.

Once you have started making fridge magnets, you will find lots of ways of using them. Be careful – it can become quite addictive...

Trevor Millum is a freelance writer and trainer. His book ‘ICT and Literacy’ is available from NATE (National Association for the Teaching of English).

For more information please visit: www.nate.org.uk

This article first appeared in Teaching & Learning - Sep 2007

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