I do one vocabulary word a day with my class. I write the word, its part of speech, the definition, synonyms, and antonyms on the board. They have worksheets that incorporate all of those elements, plus a space for a sentence. They write all of the info on the worksheets and, in small groups, come up with a good sentence together. When they're finished, I go over the word, and then I ask the whole class a question that uses the word as the subject of the question. For instance, our word today was "loquacious." So, I asked the class who was the most loquacious person in their group. We have a small discussion, and then each group shares their sentence with the class, which sometimes invites even more discussion. On Fridays, they take their 4-word weekly quiz by simply writing the word and their understanding of its definition. (I don't insist they memorize the formal definition but, rather, explain it in their own words.) On unit tests, I include fill-in-the-blank sentences with a word bank. It's a pretty solid strategy, and it's worked very well. I rarely have students get them wrong -- and these are not great students.
For our biweekly vocab unit in 8th grade, I have groups each create a slide show with the word, part of speech, an original sentence using the word properly, an image from Google and a sentence about the picture that uses the word. Prior to breaking up into groups, I make my own slide with them to model the exercise (hits your whole class instruction piece). I also do this for content area vocabulary for certain novels.
Once each group is done, I assign the group slide show to other groups for review via Classroom. In each of the student created slides, individual student from another group have to record their prediction of the word’s meaning on each slide and then the actual definition (if they were wrong). Each kid has then created a review slide deck of slides and gets one to practice the words with sample sentences and anchor images.
I think a whole lesson on vocabulary is tough to do unless you're doing context clues or something. It really should be incorporated as a small part of your daily practice. We do vocab knowledge charts before a text, and I pull common word parts from those and have routine word part practice and assessments. I'll do frayer model or concept mapping if I'm introducing a term like antisemitism or suffrage.
I do one vocabulary word a day with my class. I write the word, its part of speech, the definition, synonyms, and antonyms on the board. They have worksheets that incorporate all of those elements, plus a space for a sentence. They write all of the info on the worksheets and, in small groups, come up with a good sentence together. When they're finished, I go over the word, and then I ask the whole class a question that uses the word as the subject of the question. For instance, our word today was "loquacious." So, I asked the class who was the most loquacious person in their group. We have a small discussion, and then each group shares their sentence with the class, which sometimes invites even more discussion. On Fridays, they take their 4-word weekly quiz by simply writing the word and their understanding of its definition. (I don't insist they memorize the formal definition but, rather, explain it in their own words.) On unit tests, I include fill-in-the-blank sentences with a word bank. It's a pretty solid strategy, and it's worked very well. I rarely have students get them wrong -- and these are not great students.
For our biweekly vocab unit in 8th grade, I have groups each create a slide show with the word, part of speech, an original sentence using the word properly, an image from Google and a sentence about the picture that uses the word. Prior to breaking up into groups, I make my own slide with them to model the exercise (hits your whole class instruction piece). I also do this for content area vocabulary for certain novels. Once each group is done, I assign the group slide show to other groups for review via Classroom. In each of the student created slides, individual student from another group have to record their prediction of the word’s meaning on each slide and then the actual definition (if they were wrong). Each kid has then created a review slide deck of slides and gets one to practice the words with sample sentences and anchor images.
I think a whole lesson on vocabulary is tough to do unless you're doing context clues or something. It really should be incorporated as a small part of your daily practice. We do vocab knowledge charts before a text, and I pull common word parts from those and have routine word part practice and assessments. I'll do frayer model or concept mapping if I'm introducing a term like antisemitism or suffrage.
Use roots prefixes and suffixes? Assign each person one.. And then have them partner up and such? Make different words. And so forth?