"fancy" word wall additions

My first graders are quite bright, and they impressed me once again this morning. First of all, during "blending time", one of the words was "pollute", so we discussed some causes of pollution, which led to a brief chat about the invention of hybrid cars and how they work.

Then, best of all--

For my word wall, we use three different colors... black for regular common words, red for words that cannot be sounded out, and purple for "fancy" words. For example, we have "epiphany", "homophone", and "vertical" in purple.

Today, we added "African American", "Caucasian", and "Native American". We read a story about an African American sailor, and none of my students knew what "African American" meant. So, we had a fabulous conversation about those words-- We talked about how even though we say "black people" and "white people", those aren't really the colors of our skin, which led to Allie asking what "white people" are called (hence the addition of "caucasian" to the board!). Then we talked about how people's ancestors came from other parts of the world. I reminded them that white people haven't always been in the United States, and I asked if they knew who was here before us-- and, predictably, they answered "Indians!" So, I told them that Indians are actually people who were born in India, which led to the addition of "Native American". The most amusing part is that under all of the new word wall words, I have their "meanings" in parentheses-- "black person", "white person", and "Indian". Keep in mind this is rural northern Michigan!