The novel Word Nerd, by Canadian author Susin Nielsen, is about a 13 year old boy called Ambrose. He was constantly moving around Canada and never settled in one place due to his mother’s unstable university teaching job. In the book, Ambrose was quirky, awkward, and often insulted people without realising it. He was not very popular in most schools and often tried to reinvent himself as a rich, cool guy, rather than being himself. He would lie to the other students, and this behavior estranged him from them, and irritated his classmates when they figured out that he was lying.

There are multiple reasons why the grade 7 teachers chose this book for the MYP Language & Literacy unit. One thing that’s great about it is the theme of self-improvement that continues throughout the story. Ambrose's physical and mental growth neatly ties into how there are many changes as one transits from PYP to MYP.

In class, students were also given writing prompts to work on. We interviewed a 7th grader, Coco Daly-Hill, on her favourite writing prompt, and it was “Getting Caught”. Students had to write about a time in their lives when they have been caught doing something wrong. She wrote about how she was on a cruise ship when she was 3 and stole a Christmas decoration. Once they left the shop, she showed her parents. Afterwards, they bought the decoration and still have the decoration to this day. She liked this prompt as she had a personal anecdote to tell.

The unit concluded with a short story competition. Science teacher Mr Jeff McLean noted, “the vocabulary stories were brief, as I recall; just one or two sentences, but exceptionally powerful. I think it shows how critical your word choice has to be, especially while writing. I was extremely impressed by the grade 7 students and am continually amazed at how skilled our CIS students are, both in and out of the science classroom.”

Lisa Miller, the SS Librarian, said,  “Ms Hallam was so excited about the amazing writing that her students had done that she asked me to help her organise and judge a competition of their work. I was really happy to help! I received all the stories and read through each of them, seeing which ones were the most creative, the most thoughtful or the most technically correct - no spelling or grammar mistakes.  What I found was that every single story had a ‘best’ element, so we came up with categories that reflected that. On the day of the competition, students, parents and even the Head of School came to the library during SMART. Writers read their work out loud and everyone had a chance to celebrate their incredible creativity and effort. Everyone was really pumped and supportive – it was like being at a sports event but for stories: a librarian's dream come true! I was so proud to be a teacher at a school where the students' work was of such high quality and where they were so into the event. I was honoured to share in that stunning level of pride and energy.”

While Nerdlet Wordlet Day and the short story competition were entertaining, students also greatly benefited from the vocabulary word games and activities. The culminating activities made our learning less tedious.