How to use this Page

from Suzanne Lieurance

As a classroom teacher or home schooling parent, you want your students to be adding new words to their vocabularies all the time.

Here’s a fun way to help students take real ownership for new vocabulary words.

Create a word wall.

A word wall is simply a wall in the classroom - or the hallway - that is devoted to words and their definitions.

Any student can add to the word wall at any time.

As the teacher, you will need to have the following items available to your students at all times:

* Blank sentence strips or thick pieces of paper or tagboard

* Colorful Markers

* Masking tape, tacks, etc. for adhering the sentence strips to the word wall

* Dictionaries

Here’s how the word wall works:

Any time a student is reading and comes across a word he is not familiar with, he uses the dictionary to look up the meaning of the word. He then writes the word and its definition, along with his signature, on the sentence strip, then tacks the sentence strip to the word wall.

At a designated time during the day, students remove their sentence strips from the wall and they take turns presenting their new words and the definitions to the class. They can tell what they were reading when they came across this word and how the definition helped them figure out what that particular reading passage was all about. After the new words of the day have been discussed, have students tack them back up on the word wall. Encourage them to start using each others’ words during the day, whenever possible.

The word wall will grow and grow, of course. And, you’ll be surprised at how students will become POSSESSIVE - or take ownership - for their own words.

During other daily activities in the classroom, if someone uses a word in conversation that another student has tacked up to the word wall, you’ll probably hear that student say, “Hey, you just used MY word.”

And that’s what you want - students using new words, being aware that they use new words, and feeling a sense of pride and ownership in their expanded vocabularies!

Try it!