Vocabulary

I wish I knew where I found the vocabulary levels so I could give the author proper credit.

Each week when introducing the new vocabulary words the students would rate the words.  It can be done on paper (make a list of the words for the students and they each rate the words) or it can be done using the smartboard.  (Each student had a card with the levels and meanings and a clicker.)  


Personally I liked the smartboard (using clickers) because of the graph generated by the results.     We would spend a little time discussing the graph and how about half the class really knew the word or less than a fourth of the class knows the word.  The graph fascinated the students.

I had to remind students to be honest about their knowledge of the words.  At the beginning everyone put their knowledge level of all words at 3 or 4.  Once they were comfortable with the knowledge that no one would know who put the rating of 1 or 2 they were honest.

Once we rated and discussed the graphs we moved on to a powerpoint with the words.  The powerpoint was loaded with pictures, clip art and video clips that were intended to help the student understand the meaning of the word.  The powerpoint was set up so the word did not appear until clicked to appear.  The students spent some time thinking about what word was represented, then discussed with a shoulder partner and finally I would make the word appear.  They loved being right.  I showed them an example of the word in a sentence then they spent some time thinking of a sentence to share with their shoulder partner.

Here are the levels (if you know who created this, please let me know):

1.  I never saw it before.
2.  I've heard it, but I don't know what it means.
3.  I recognize it in context as having something to do with...
4.  I know it well.

Pictographs Done!

I created the "skeleton" of the pictograph for the students and then together we created the pictograph using data we created from polling the class about our favorite ice cream.  I kept it simple giving students three choices, chocolate, vanilla and other.  Each ice cream cone on the graph equaled two.  Making a 1/2 cone was interesting.  (We put a box over half of the cone and filled the box with white.) We put the "guts" into the pictograph.  The students watched me on the big screen and they did the same on their computers.  They were delighted with their graphs. 

We collected new data for each student to create their own pictograph.  We did this in about 20 minutes.  Each student picked a topic and two choices to put with a category of other.  I open the smart software and each student turned on their clicker.  I put the topic and choices on the page and the students voted.  When we were done each child had a bar graph with their data.  They turned that data into a pictograph.  This time they did the skeleton along with the guts.  :)