How to Teach VocabularyHere are fun and easy ways for how to teach vocabulary. Building academic vocabulary doesn't have to be stressful, and even our youngest students should be exposed to learning new word meanings.
Many teachers find they enjoy it so much that it becomes part of their daily lesson plans. We all know that our students come to us with a huge variety of background knowledge in language. Our lower-income students are already at a disadvantage due to limited usage of higher-order language use in the home environment. Not only do these kids not know the words, they have no idea how to break them down and use them in a meaningful way. This leaves many teachers wondering how to teach vocabulary in the best way that promotes word consciousness. Not to worry: here are some fabulous ideas you can implement tomorrow in your own classrooms! Quick Vocabulary Lessons1. How to Teach Vocabulary with a Word of the Day  This resource comes from Primary Concepts. I have used it for four years and it is a great resource for how to teach vocabulary. Each day there is a short story about the Wordly family that focuses on one vocabulary word. But what makes it unique is that each word is broken down into focusing on a prefix, suffix, Greek or Latin word part, etc. For example, the word "cheerful" is focused on the suffix "ful" and the students learn that it means "full of." Therefore the word "cheerful" means "full of cheer." This is then applied to other words to help students learn how to derive word meaning from looking for the suffix and the root word. There is not a single worksheet with it, which I love. It is very natural and I use it as part of my floor time each morning. I wrote all of the words onto index cards, underlined the focused part of each vocabulary word and we review them quickly each morning. This is a fabulous way to promote word consciousness. By the way, I also use another resource by Primary Concepts called Idiom of the Week 2. How to Teach Vocabulary With Nursery Rhymes Choose a simple nursery rhyme, such as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and challenge students to replace as many words as they can with synonyms that are more sophisticated. I did this as a whole class activity a number of times before providing a gradual release to small groups. Here is what we came up with: How I ponder what you are. Up above the globe so high, Like a quadrilateral in the sky. Sparkle, glisten, miniature sphere of fire, How I query what you are. Look at the academic vocabulary used in this lesson: globe, orb, quadrilateral, sphere…not to mention the adjectives and a great lead in to the word "mini" and how to look for it in other words describing small things (minivan, minuscule, etc). I guided this, but my second graders could use their background knowledge to relate to these new words and I am seeing them pop up in their writing and hearing them use them in conversations! 3. How to Teach Vocabulary during an Interactive Read Aloud It doesn't matter what the genre is…you can do this activity with any read aloud. I always have sticky notes and a pen by my side, and when I find an interesting word during a read aloud I will stop, write it on the sticky note and quickly discuss the meaning of it. A student then puts in on my Vocabulary Chart. This chart is simply four pieces of paper labeled Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs. For example, today we were reading about penguins and we came across the word sleek which described the outer layer of penguins feathers (we also hit "downy" for the underlayer). We acted it out to target the kinesthetic learning style that many students have, then added it to the paper labeled "Adjectives," because that is how it was used in the story. All of this only takes a minute or two: keeping it short so as not to disrupt the actual read aloud too much is key to keeping their attention. Later the children can take the sticky notes off the paper to use in their writing when they need to. We also use them for sorts according to different characteristics and build bigger words from them (sleeker, sleekest). 4. How to Teach Vocabulary Using Word Wheels Cut out some large circles. Draw a smaller circle in the middle, then draw spokes out to the edge from it to make 6-8 sections. Inside the circle put a Greek or Latin root word or affix, along with the meaning of it (use Word of the Day: Bit by Bit These word wheels should be hung in the classroom as anchor charts for reference the rest of the year. It becomes a word wall that is highly focused on academic vocabulary. I like to coordinate these with special holidays because those hold great importance in a primary classroom. My Valentine's Word Wheel uses the base word gram which means "write or draw", and the sections have words like: candygram, telegram, cryptogram, gramophone, monogram, and tangram. Each word is illustrated for Valentine's Day, with the cryptogram being a secret "I Love You" message, and the tangram being the shape of a heart. The younger the students the more direct instruction and guidance is needed, but it is a really neat way to address how to teach vocabulary in powerful and robust manner. Plus, it's a lot of fun! Return to Top: How to Teach Vocabulary
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, and the kids find them to be hysterically funny. Again, it only takes a few minutes, but the results are amazing.
