Recently when I was at the leadership conference I was fortunate enough
to have a few moments to speak with Pat about making words with upper
grade students. We had been making words the traditional way but our
fifth grade teachers thought it was not challenging enough. Pat
suggested a modification and asked that our teachers try it and provide
feedback.

Here's the variation. The teacher chooses the mystery word as usual, 
and
shows the students the letters in the word. Then instead of directing
the making of specific words, the students are allowed to make as many
words as they can on their own.  We allow about 5-6 minutes.

Beforehand the teacher selects "her" words made from the mystery word
and tells the students that all of her words are of at least 5(maybe 4
at first) letters long, and she hopes they will be able to have some of
the same words as her. This encourages the students to look for longer
words rather than 2 and 3 letter words.

When their time is up, the teacher asks a show of hands for how many
students have some three letter words, four letter words, etc. Then she
asks students to share words they have with at least 5 letters, because
at this point they are trying to match the words that the teacher 
chose.

If  someone gives a 5 or more letter word that the teacher didn't
choose, congratulate them for a great word but tell them it just 
doesn't
happen to be a "teacher chosen" word. (If you have used wordsplay.com 
or
another site that gives you all the possible words, this might be a 
good
point to say, " The mystery word has 162 possible words within it, so
your words are as correct as mine.")

If a student says a word that is one of the teacher words, make a big
deal of them guessing one of your words.

Continue until all of your words are showing (you may have to just tell
them some of them depending on the complexity of the words you have
chosen.)

Then you are ready for sorting and transferring.
Today my mystery word was from a nifty thrifty fifty activity,
"irreplaceable"(page 83 in the Month-by-Month Phonics for Upper 
Grades.)
Our sorting and transferring dealt with the number of syllables in the
words and words with prefixes.

The children seem to love this variation. They liked making words
anyway, but they were so excited when they were able to come up with
some of the "teacher chosen" words.

Pat, thanks for the suggestion. It's working great with our students. I
hope I have described it accurately as far as what you had in mind.

Jean in Virginia