Vocabulary

Multiple Meaning Words!!! My colleague, Jill the magnificent, just loves working with students on multiple meaning words. She starts the students off in a dialogue to see what they already know about the word. From there she will present sentences and ask them 'how' the word is used in the sentence using their context clues strategies. Once students are familiar with the concept, they are asked to look for multiple meaning words to add to our word wall. Students really become invested looking for these words and often use dictionaries to determine the meanings and part of speech. Later, in the vocabulary center, students are asked to use these words in sentences with their various meanings. As you can see by the word choices, we were doing a unit on plants.

LLV books by National Geographic are a wonderful resource for students to use for both content knowledge and vocabulary exploration.

vocabulary

When reading, we taught students strategies such as reading ahead, rereading, looking at illustrations, pictures, graphs, using the glossary, etc. to determine the meaning of unknown vocabulary. We start by modeling each strategy and then use the gradual release of responsibility to foster independence. Students fill in this organizer to show their thinking and to hold them accountable for their own learning. This activity is then used in our vocabulary center, which is what is pictured here.

Vocabulary

Linear Arrays! A great way to show relationships between words. I love using them. It really helps ELL's to gain a deeper meaning of new vocabulary by showing the relationship to vocabulary already known.