Go Fishing From Jan Kennedy Phillips, a special education teacher at Woodruff Elementary School in Woodruff, South Carolina "My students love to fish for words. Using a 2-foot wooden dowel, yarn line attached, and a disc magnet hot-glued to the line's end, they fish in three pond baskets containing root words, prefixes and suffixes. Each word and word-part has a paper clip attached. Students are given a list of possible words to be caught. Fishing first in the root word pond, the student must decide whether to fish for a prefix, a suffix or both. Any catch not resulting in a real word must be thrown back. After a unit on FISH and -ARK family words, my students want the SHARK to be added to the root word pond every time - considering that to be the most valued catch! We can extend the activity as we calculate sums and differences using group and individual number of catches. This is a popular center activity and can also lend itself to graphing results. When studying measurement, we will assign a weight to each letter of the word made and calculate the size of the catch. Another positive is improving hand-eye coordination as the student tries to catch a particular card."