"Students learn more words when we focus on fewer words and use those words in our own speech." -Kylene Beers
A list of bound and derivational morphemes, collated by Elizabeth Coehlo, used to generate new words.
GAMES TO ENCOURAGE REPEATED PRACTICE
You can create bingo, snakes and ladders, dominoes and many more games using the high frequency words available, or generate a custom set of your own.
Discovery Education's free puzzlemaker generator for crosswords, word searches, and more.
Create your own printable scrambled word worksheets.
This is a great game that you can play with students to help them practice and review new vocabulary terms. The game requires players to make connections , illustrate , act out, define , identify synonyms and antonyms, and generate sentences for vocabulary terms.
Remember the old cootie catcher game you used to love as a child? Here is an example and blank template you can use to create a vocabulary review cootie catcher for the classroom.
A word wall is a collection of words which are displayed in large visible letters on a wall, bulletin board, or other display surface in a classroom. Reading Rockets has compiled a list of ideas and examples on how to incorporate word walls for different subject areas.
GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS
To add a collaborative aspect to learning vocabulary, divide students into groups of three and give each group two words and two blank transparencies of the graphic organizer or on chart paper. Students complete the graphic organizer for each of their assigned words and present their word to the class on the overhead or chart paper. At this time, the entire class completes graphic organizers for each of the words presented. For homework that night, complete the practice section for each word.
This blank vocabulary template, created by Reading Quest.Org, requires students to provide a definition, picture, sentence, and synonyms of an assigned term.
This blank vocabulary template, created by Worksheet Works.Com, requires students to provide a definition, characteristics, examples, and non-examples of an assigned term.
FLASHCARDS AND VISUALS
This is a great resource that provides videos, games, quizzes, and flashcards for middle school and high school level vocabulary words.
The site provides teachers with hundreds of printable flashcards that incorporate memorable photo images with vocabulary terms and definitions.
A free service for creating web-based study flashcards that can be shared with others.
Free Technology for Teachers features ten good places to create and find flashcards online.
This site gives you the ability to turn a Google Spreadsheet into a set of online flashcards, word searches, jeopardy games, and more.
Quizlet is a platform for teachers and students to create digital flash cards. It can then automatically generate interactive games of the material entered into it.
Visual Dictionary, to learn by way of image with thematic, clear and precise pages, with concise and rigorous texts, multilingual, the InfoVisual will become an academic resource. Different from an encyclopedia or from traditional online dictionaries, thesauri and glossaries because the images replace the words.
Visual perception is culturally determined and visual cognition varies from culture to culture. The CAPL project seeks to explore this idea through a collection of authentic photographs arranged by language and context.
ACADEMIC VOCABULARY
Coxhead's (2000) list of academic words. There are 570 headwords and about 3000 words altogether.
The goal of this article from Tan Huynh's blog "Empowering ELLs" is to share a process for teaching ELs to use context clues to decipher the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary words.
This is a great resource for identifying Tier 2 vocabulary that should be emphasized in the classroom. There is a list of 55 words and definitions that have been highlighted as essential academic vocabulary.
This is a great article by Kristina Robertson on outlining three key strategies for expanding ELLs' mastery of academic language, along with examples and step-by-step explanations.
Here is a tool you can use to identify the three tiers of vocabulary within a text. Texts entered in this tool will be sorted into four colour-coded categories: 1000 most common vocabulary words, second 1000 most common vocabulary words, academic vocabulary, and infrequently used words.