Vocabulary Work

Every other week or so, we've introduced 3-5 new vocabulary words to the class. These words have been tied to our class work somehow; they may have appeared in a read aloud, been used to describe traits as learners that we're working to adopt, or are more sophisticated words to use in our writing and speaking.

When introducing new vocabulary words, we teach the definition, synonyms, and antonyms words explicitly and the students copy them in their vocabulary notebooks along with a sentence and picture for each word. Additionally, we have physical actions that we do as we say each word that help us recall the meaning of the words. We post our vocabulary word cards (pictured below) around our room. They're color-coded to show what part of speech each word is and have the synonyms in the right-hand corners and antonyms in the left-hand corners.

We've recently begun wearing a vocabulary word on Friday. Each student is given a word on a lanyard as he or she arrives Friday morning, we greet each other with our vocabulary names, and then do our best to use the words throughout the day. Our goal is that we begin to use these words more automatically in our speaking and writing and that we recognize them in our reading. 

During Lit Skills, we've spent some time working on getting to know these words more thoroughly. We've written and performed vocabulary raps, taken turns leading the class in mimicking the motion to our word, and, most recently, created short skits that show the meaning of the words.

The videos below show our most recent work with the skits inspired by tingoed.com. We used the video for "chide" on Tingo Ed for inspiration (you can watch that video here: http://www.tingoed.com/vocab-videos---chide.html). The videos show our work towards growing more comfortable with the words.