Expanding Vocabulary Daily

Through all of the reading and writing that goes on each and every day, students are always expanding their vocabulary.  In addition, here are a few of the resources students have right at their fingertips, and some of the activities we use to encourage and practice the learning of new words!

Our Word Wall continues to grow each week.  Students are expected to use this as a resource when reading and writing.

These "Popcorn" words are those words that "pop" up frequently in our writing, but are not yet Word Wall Words.  This bulletin board is another resource in our classroom that students are welcome to use when writing.  

In addition to the above resources, every student has their own personal copy of a "Children's Dictionary" in their desk to use, as well as, an "ABC" booklet containing a list of all of this year's Word Wall Words.   We practice using our dictionaries often just to make sure we don't forget about this valuable resource.  

Having a variety of resources available eliminates a lot of the "Can you help me spell . . .?" requests from students.  We want the boys and girls to become more independent when working. A large part of this is enabling them to know where resources are located, how to use them, and when it is appropriate to use them. 

 Another activity we do is to brainstorm and look for new "exciting" words to take the place of older "tired" words.  We discuss the shades of meaning in the new words as we add them to an anchor chart that is displayed in the room.  Eventually, this chart will be reduced to a notebook size that can be added to each student's writing folder.  This folder is full of reference pages to use during writing.

  

Poetry is such a fun way to introduce new vocabulary.  The boys and girls look forward to our poetry time each day and remind me if I forget!  

As we learn about new topics through math, science, and social studies, we also add new vocabulary words to our ever-expanding list.

As shown in a previous post, our math and language arts vocabulary terms are posted in the room as a visual reminder.  Below, students get "hands-on" practice to create a concrete model to help them further understand those concepts and terms.  (Ex. compare, bigger, longer, smaller, shorter, greater, less than, measure)  The kiddos are to use these terms whenever we talk about math, write about math, or play math games.  

Here students are using connecting cubes to compare lengths.  They have to be able to read and understand the terms on the recording sheet as they write in their results.






























These are just a few of the activities and resources we use to "Expand Vocabulary" each and every day in our classroom! Watch for more as our year progresses!