Hello! How do you work with vocabulary with your students? I am interested in before reading, during reading, and after reading activities. I will be working with small groups, but it would be great if anyone would be willing to share activities that they use and the students respond to.
I use a strategy called RIVIT. And it certainly does rivit the students' attention to the words you want them to learn!
Choose the words you want to use for a game. Procede in a way similar to hangman. Start by writing a short line on the board for every letter in the word. Then give the students the first letter and have them guess the word. Example: before would look like this in the first step:
b _ _ _ _ _ If no one guesses it, add the next letter: be_ _ _ _. Continue adding letters until someone guesses the word. If the group gets the word before the last letter, they get a point. If they don't get the word, you get the point. With most groups and most words, the kids will always get it first. They love to beat the teacher. Once the word is discovered, have a short discussion about meaning, have one or more students use it in a sentence, etc. They always enjoy it.
Hope this helps.
Before reading- "word detectives"- give each student a magnifying glass (just to make it fun), tell them the page # and the word and have them search for the word. After everyone has found the word, have them read the entire sentence the word is in to try to figure out the meaning. This also helps with modeling how to use context clues. Another before reading idea is to introduce all of the vocab words, discuss meanings, and have students write a short prediction about the story using the vocab words. Guess the covered word is also a game kids like--Write out sentences using the vocab words in context to the story, cover the vocab word and have the kids guess what the vocab word is.
After reading- "Hop to It"- make a grid using a shower curtain liner and tape down vocab words in different squares. Read a definition or a sentence(omitting the correct word) and have students hop on the correct vocab word. Or you could have students toss a bean bag and whatever word that it lands on have them use in a sentence or define. Another idea- tape a vocab word to students' backs. Have other students give clues about the word and try to have each student guess which word is on his/her back. "Swat it"- post vocab words written on cute bug shapes on the board. Read the definition or a sentence with the word omitted and have the student swat the correct word.
You can play "Guess the Covered Word". I have never played it with my students, but I plan to this year. You write different sentences using vocabulary words on sentence strips and cover up the vocabulary word with a post-it note. The students will guess what the covered word could possibly be while the teacher writes them on the board. Then the teacher moves the post-it so everyone can see the first letter in the word. The students then see if they all agree on what the word is before it is uncovered.
I do Guess the Covered Word as well and the kids LOVE it!! I use my overhead projector and project it onto my dry erase board and many of my GTCW activities come from the Four Blocks books. It is a bit tedious to cover them with little post its, but once you get the hang of it, it is super easy! I have the kids set a goal of how many words they think they should be able to get.
I put it up and we read the piece sentence by sentence. I have the kids give me three guesses and a scribe records them on the board next to the piece. We learn to look at the space provided and the context of the sentence before we make any guesses. Then I uncover the first part of the word. You really should cover to the first vowel as one group (the onset) and then cover the rest of the word as the second group. After I uncover the first part, we see if any of our guesses would work. If they do, then the scribe writes it write on the board on the piece itself (if that makes sense, they are not writing on the overhead, but on the board which I projected it onto...I am confusing myself here!) and we move on to the next sentence. If none of the 3 guesses works, then they can come up with 2 more and we vote which one works best.
When we are done we read it again together and give a drumroll before I pull off the remaining post it. If the kids are correct, they get a point toward their goal. If they were not, we talk about it and work the reasoning together.
The whole lesson takes about 25-30 minutes when you used to it. The kids just love it and want to "play" all the time!!
Vocabulary Fun: Bug Swat - Bug shapes with vocabulary words on them - one on each paper. Stick them up around the room. Put class in groups, give each group a fly swatter. Each team member gets a chance. One person from each team comes to the front of the room, the teacher reads a definition, the first to swat it, gets the tally point on the board. Big younger students skittles for each correct swat!
Vocabulary Fun: Bug Swat - Bug shapes with vocabulary words on them - one on each paper. Stick them up around the room. Put class in groups, give each group a flyswatter. Each team member gets a chance. One person from each team comes to the front of the room, the teacher reads a definition, the first to swat it, gets the tally point on the board. Big younger students skittles for each correct swat!
07-13-2006, 11:39 AM
Simple View
