Growing Vocabulary

Carolyn Lingenfelter, a seventh- and eighth-grade language arts teacher at Perry Middle School in Perry, Ohio

At the beginning of each week, my students head a sheet of paper with the title “Words of the Week.” Every day I put a new word on the overhead projector. They copy it onto their sheet and we take several minutes to talk about the definition and practice using the word in sentences. I call on students to share their sentences and the word's part of speech with the class. We also discuss the origin of the word and other related words. The students, who answer correctly when called upon, earn a bonus point on their Daily Performance Chart. With this incentive, “Words of the Week” has become a popular activity and the expanded word power is showing up in the drafts my students write for their portfolios.

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Chris Anderson | 2010/05/24

Great Idea, esp. the bonus point. And it may be even more effective if you plan a semester or year's worth of words ahead of time, so you can [Explicit] a logical progression of either complexity or relatedness. You also could organize the words according to other objectives, like: * correlating them with literary themes or topics you'll cover; * correlating them with parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs etc.); * correlating them with linguistic origins (Latin, Greek, French, German, Old English etc.); or * extracting them from other subjects (art, math, science, history etc.) in collaboration with your colleagues in those subjects.

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