Working in a rural Virginia elementary school, I found that one of the issues my students were having was a fundamental deficit in vocabulary language. It seemed that several students had the reading skills and strategies, but their lack of vocabulary knowledge prevented them from finding success on the reading tests that simulated the Virginia English SOL test, which is the standardized test that 3rd grade and up take each year. Obviously, I don't want to "teach to the test," but I also don't want to set my students up for failure either.
To combat this issue there were a few things we did this past school year.
Words Their Way, a word study program, was used to differentiate learning for my students. I love, love, love this program for its emphasis on word patterns and morphology, hands-on learning, and ease in differentiation. My students also worked on affixes and roots all year long. Each student in second grade through middle school makes a ring of index cards to carry from grade to grade. Each index card has a word part, like the prefix "dis-." One the back of each card is the definition of the word part and three example words.
Of course, there were also other vocabulary words we worked on during the school year, such as the words from our reading passages and stories. My students had two vocabulary walls. One wall kept our current words we were learning.
On the other wall we placed our old words. As students used the old words outside of our Language Arts class, they would write the sentence down with their name on a post-it strip and attach it to the word. For some odd reason, words like "lunatic" and "eccentric" filled up quickly with post-it strips. ;) The day after we posted "usher," oodles of students were posting their sentences and you couldn't see the word. That day I had to make a new rule: If a celebrity's name is the same as one of our words, only one student can post a sentence with that name.
As we neared the end of the year, about a month before my students were scheduled to take their SOL tests, we began reviewing vocabulary they would need to know. I made a vocabulary sort & match which targeted the key vocabulary that students needed for success in Reading and Language Arts class and especially on the Virginia English Standards of Learning (SOL) test. I combed through the English SOL Curriculum Framework and released tests for key terms and recurring testing language to include for my students. You can access these cards on TpT here: English SOL Key Vocabulary Match for Grades 3-5.
Although I made the sort specifically for my 4th graders, these are words third and fifth graders need to know as well. Also, the terms are general, so even though I designed them for my little Virginians, they could easily be utilized anywhere -- not just in Virginia.
There were several ways we used these in the classroom. We began with a whole group review and discussion. We went over each term, which was projected onto the SMART Board using the ELMO, and we discussed the definition. Special attention was given to the words that were similar in meaning or were frequently confused. I also made a point to share with the students WHY these terms were important for them to know.
I created a Vocabulary Center, which was used during Guided Reading time. The vocabulary words and definitions were printed onto cardstock, cut out, and laminated. The laminated vocabulary words were posted on a bulletin board and the definition cards were put into a baggie. Students worked in small groups of three or four students to match the definitions with the vocabulary term.
I made a mini-version for each student to have. When they finished an activity early, they went to the board to practice sorting the terms. Once five students were over there, the other early finishers sat at their desk and sorted their mini-version.
We then began writing sentences using these key vocabulary words. All year we'd talked about good, grade-level appropriate sentences, but, of course, I reminded them again. I also challenged them to try to write sentences that contained context clues, so someone reading their sentences could figure out the meaning of the words.
After about two weeks of reviewing these words, my students played a game using these words. They really enjoyed that -- and were all able to participate since we'd had so much practice with these words.
There are so many ways these vocabulary cards could be used. I'd love to hear how you would use these! Leave a comment below telling me your idea for vocabulary word review and practice.
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