For example, have students rate how high on an intensity scale they see a word when introducing synonyms, and move to one or the other corner of the room to vote on the intensity with their feet. We don’t have to think of vocabulary learning and practice as physically static. Older students can focus on words that describe processes (think bed-ation or storm-ation) and describe why those words are silly. For example, younger students can work on drawing waks (the plural of wak, an unknown animal), when they are learning the use of the plural. This activity can be made more complex or simple for use with students in a range of grades. Help students formulate why their drawings relate to the concept, and how the prefix or suffix changes the word. When working on prefixes and suffixes, have students draw what they imagine for the words unplayed or redrink. Draw Guessed Meanings of Unknown Words and Non-Words Students can use this thesaurus to explain, for example, why irritated and forgetful aren’t opposites, and why content and unhappy can be. Visual Thesaurus shows the distance between more closely and less closely interrelated words, and can be a great way of deepening students’ understanding of synonyms, antonyms, and words that are somewhere in between. This can be a great reading comprehension tool, as you can ask students to reflect on the words that appear most often as potential themes from a text, or to debate whether a theme is actually more important than its size in the cloud would indicate. For example, the word clouds in Wordle can show a word as bigger or smaller depending on how frequently it appears in a text. These tools work in different ways and lend themselves to different activities. This technique can also be very helpful for learners who think in more visual ways, allowing them to integrate the word meaning, or the semantic aspects, with a visual sense of how one word connects to the next. Using tools such as Visual Thesaurus, which lets students see the ways words interrelate, and Wordle, which lets them create word clouds, we can start to help students see related and unrelated words as chances to play. While we want to build vocabulary mostly through deep discussion and dialogue, there are tools that can promote an increased engagement and understanding of specific words. This process of description will help build their vocabularies and strengthen their abilities to make connections between one topic and the next. For example, that same acute angle can look like a door that’s partly shut, but not like a smile or a cloud.įor every word chosen, ask students to be specific about the difference between the non-example and the original word. Ask not just, “What does this word look or function like?” but also, “What does it not look or function like?” For instance, acute angle can look “sharp” but not “curvy” or “wavy” or “square.”Īsk students to play games or have mock competitions to come up with the most creative non-examples, and have them explain their reasoning.
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