Vocabulary Activities
Have you run out of ways to teach vocabulary in fun and engaging ways? The following activities will help you in your goals to help students build vocabulary. These vocabulary building activities are sure to get your students to expand their vocabulary.
Use Foldables
Having kids use foldables is a great way for students to remember new information. It helps engage students in their learning, provide kinesthetic feedback for students, and helps students learn to take notes. I got the idea for this vocabulary foldable from A teacher's treasure blog. I put my own twist on the idea and have created a printable that you can use for the foldable.
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Your words, my story
This is an activity based on a vocabulary strategy developed by Magaret Richek called Semantic Impressions. I changed the name of the strategy so its more kid friendly and created a handout. In this activity a teacher picks vocabulary words from a story that is going to be read. The teacher then makes a list of the words in the order that they are presented in the story. Before the story is actually read students compose their own stories using the words. When writing the stories students must:
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One word - multiple meanings
This is a great handout to help students understand that words can have more than one meaning.
Vocabmark
This is an idea by Brown, Phillips, and Stephens (1993), in which, students have bookmark that they can write down unfamiliar words that they come across. This is a great way for students to monitor their own understanding of what they are reading. This activity also allows students to make their own vocabulary word lists so the words that they are learning are individualized.
Brown, J. E., Phillips, L., & Stephens, L. (1993). Toward Literacy; Theory and applications for teaching writing in the content areas. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishers, ITP.
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Affix Trees
This is a great idea that I found on the Dandelions and Dragonflies blog. She has a template for the trunk that you can download and use. The idea is pretty simple, each trunk has either a root, suffix, or prefix on it and the leaves are all the words that you can make with those roots/affixes.
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Virtual Field Trips
Field trips are great ways to expand students background knowledge around a topic as well as their vocabulary but we don't always have enough time or resources to get students out of the classroom.
The great news is that with just a computer, a connection to the internet, and a projector you can take your students on virtual field trips. Steps
Websites If you have checked it out yet there is a great new site that would be a great tool to planning a virtual field trip called MentorMob. I would highly recommend that you try it out. The site is still new so there are that many of what they call Playlists. (A collection of websites around a topic that you view in a certain order) I am linking to one about the causes of World War II so you can get an overview of what the site is like.
Main Causes of World War II - MentorMob |
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Word Investigation - Morpheme Analysis
I've just finished a new e-book called Word Investigation. This book is full of graphic organizers that you can use to analysis morphemes in words. Doing this activity will help your students to recognize patterns in words, which in turn will help them to build their vocabularies, become better spellers and decode big words.
These graphic organizers are based on the idea of Morphemic Triangles by Rod Winters. To learn more about them I suggest you read the article he wrote for the Reading Teacher. Winters, R.. (2009). Interactive Frames for Vocabulary Growth and Word Consciousness. The Reading Teacher, 62(8), 685-690. |
Ice cream cone synonyms
Here is a fun activity to get students to stop using boring words and expand their vocabulary. This synonym activity has students write a "boring word" onto an ice cream cone and then synonyms are written on the ice cream scoops.
Why not have each student be responsible for a different word and then put them on a wall for a great wall display. Below is a template for the ice cream cones. Just print them on colored paper or have your students color them.
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Synonym Flower
Place a word in the center of the flower and then put synonyms on the pedals. This graphic organizer is a quick activity to increase students vocabulary.
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Vocabulary Games
Find more ideas for teaching vocabulary on my vocabulary games page.