Vocabulary Building

I wanted to revisit and share some ideas that I have used in my classroom to help build vocabulary in my second grade class.

I have a word work center that students can go to when they are finished their work.  At this center, students can build words with letters and/or build sentences with words.  Here is one of my new English as a Second Language students on one of his first days of school and he was just trying it out.  Later I had him put the ABC’s in order.

 Here we are using a “chunk” of a book.  It is a typed out copy of a book that we read without pictures so that we can visualize these images in our minds.  This student is highlighting the vocabulary from the story. (Book credit:  Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude by:  Kevin O’Malley)

 The vocabulary is written up on cards and one is handed out to each student.  One by one the students come up to the front of the room and tell the class how to say the word and what they think it means.  They are also allowed to say they don’t know in which case, the rest of the class can help.

Once the words are in the pocket chart there are many things you can do.  Sometimes I have a small print copy of the words and students get into A/B partners to sort the words. Then we all share what our sorting rules are. In this case, the words were so funny and the book is about a cool dude and a princess so I asked the students to come up and sort the words into which ones seemed like boy words and which ones seemed like girl words.  Here is what it looked like then:

We will be having more fun with the Thesaurus another day!
Thanks so much for visiting my blog and taking a look at some of the vocabulary work we have been doing this year.

If you would also like some ideas on Data Notebooks in Kindergarten, visit the next blog in this hop by Angela Griffith of The Daily Alphabet.

As a matter of choice, you may want to visit the link up below instead and choose just the topic you are interested in.

document.write(”);