A new week means new vocabulary words from our basal reader. How can we practice them in a way that makes students really THINK about the meanings and REMEMBER them? Worksheets are ok for some things, but learning and practicing vocabulary words aren't on that list. I like to have my students get creative with their words... using them in sentences, poems, and songs, giving examples, synonyms, antonyms, and non-examples, and creating illustrations with them.
My munchkins are always up for a challenge, but when I introduced a new vocabulary activity a few weeks ago, they were a little skeptical. I could see the wheels turning and the voices in their heads were screaming, "What, is she NUTS?"
You see, this activity involved taking all eight of their weekly vocabulary words and using them in one picture. Yup, you read that right... ONE PICTURE. And it couldn't be just any jumbling of random items thrown together to include all of their words. No, their picture had to have a CENTRAL THEME. The words had to relate to each other and their picture had to show that relationship. AND they had to write a sentence or two to explain it.
It took them a while to really think and talk to each other and throw some ideas around before the ball started rolling, but once they started working, my munchkins were on fire! Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of the finished products (I hadn't started blogging then, and didn't realize how important my camera would become). I did post the activity on teacherspayteachers.com and you can find it
here.
You can also find several other vocabulary activities I recently posted, and you can get them individually or in my
Vocabulary Activities Bundle, which has 5 activities you can do with virtually any group of vocabulary words, from any subject. Let me know how well they work (or don't work!)!
