How to Make Vocabulary Fun!

One thing that I found interesting in this week's readings was the emphasis on how to make teaching vocabulary fun and interesting- something "Vocabulary Lessons" by Camille Blachowicz and Peter Fisher talks about.  For example, word walls are something requires minimal preparation and cost to start up and is a unique way to engage students while learning new vocabulary words. What I like about word walls is they can be done for just about anything and are not limited to just student names or common words; teachers can create word walls to help teach vocabulary learned throughout science or it can be an interactive tool to help teach synonyms. Here are a couple examples of some word walls that I found:

founds at http://pinterest.com/pin/173724215/

This word wall is used to teach synonyms to many different words

Found at http://pinterest.com/pin/245768758/

This word wall is portable- it allows for students to take a folder with the letter they are looking at. Though this is not visible to everyone from their desks, this is a great way to have a word wall if you are limited on space!


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Fount at http://pinterest.com/pin/293787698/



Another great example for teaching kids "like" words!  Each petal is a synonym to the center of the flower

Here, environmental print is used in a word wall to help kids recognize words they might see every day and place it with the letter it starts with!

I also liked the article by Lane and Allen. I found it really neat how the teacher used her classroom duties, like "Weather Watcher" and "Zoopkeeper" to build the studnets vocabulary throughout the year.

I found this neat weather watcher guide that students could make and I think it would be neat to have the students make a new one as their vocabulary expands through out the year. For example, instead of just having "cloudy" they could change it to "overcast" and instead of "cold" they could put "fridge" or "freezing".