Academic Vocabulary Toolkit

Chapter 4 SIOP

Academic Vocabulary Toolkit

Three Sections

Start

INDEX

Section Three

Section Two

Section One

Section One

Word Consciousness:

Classroom Implementation

Classroom Strategies:

word Consciousness:

Definition

When a student becomes curious and shows signs of interest with words and their meanings. Those same students can use their personal vocabulary knowing synonyms, antonyms, and parts of word families to help in understanding words and their meanings. Students' abilities to learn, understand, and know words with their meanings can be helped through activities including class discussions, word walls, and vocabulary games.

Classroom Strategies

Strategy One

Strategy Two

Classroom strategy one:

Act It Out:

A total physical response activity where students use physical movement to reinforce their memory and understanding of words. This helps in building connections between words and actions thus strengthening a student's ability to recall words and definitions. As students go over new words, they can dramatize, mime-acting, or act out what the word means. “Shrug” - students would physically shrug “Grab or Grasp” - students would physically grab or grasp something in the air or item “Crawl” - students would physically crawl on all four’s on the ground.

classroom strategy two:

Vocabulary Bingo:

• A bingo game of any size (3 x 3 - 9 words, 4 x 4 - 16 words, or 5 x 5 - 25 words), that revolves around words that the students are or have learned in class.
• For each word, instead of saying the word a synonym, antonym, or definition could be said. Then the students could figure out what word it is and mark it on their bingo card.
• The definition could be put in a box and the word could be said but the students have to find the box with the correct definition of the word on it.

classroom implementation

How I would implement this in my class

In a 2nd grade classroom I would implement the “act it “ activity. We would all read a book that is up to level for the class and while reading we would point out the important vocabulary words or words that pertain to the week's vocabulary words. Then after the book is read, we would take the vocab words and say them, define them, and find a motion that represents the definition or correlates to the definition of the word.

Section Two

Challenging Strategy

Non-Challenging Strategy

Scaffolding Instruction

Challenging Strategy

Context Clue Analysis

• This is where students use surrounding words, clues, or text to infer as to what a specific word might mean.
• This can be challenging because emergent bilingual students may not have a full understanding of all the words on a page, from this they may not understand key words that will impact the inference of a definition. Wrong understanding can cause a wrong inference of a definition.

Non-Challenging strategy

Visual Supports (pictures, graphic organizers, physical items)

• This where students have access to looking at pictures, graphic organizers, or physical items that all correlate to the definition of a word. This will allow for the students to connect vocabulary with a concrete meaning.
• This can be seen as easier for students because they will be able to use items they have seen in day to day life and connect them to new words they are learning. They are able to use old information to learn new information. And with the use of visuals they will in the future be able to see a similar image and possibly remember the definition of a word they learned.

Non-Challenging strategy

Visual Supports (pictures, graphic organizers, physical items)

• This is where students have access to looking at pictures, graphic organizers, or physical items that all correlate to the definition of a word. This will allow for the students to connect vocabulary with a concrete meaning.
• This can be seen as easier for students because they will be able to use items they have seen in day to day life and connect them to new words they are learning. They are able to use old information to learn new information. And with the use of visuals they will in the future be able to see a similar image and possibly remember the definition of a word they learned.

Scaffolding Instruction

Scaffolding Instruction to Make the Challenging Strategy More Accessible

A way to scaffold and make the challenging strategy more accessible is the teacher can model and guide context clue use with sentence frames and visual supports. This can include the teacher can explicitly model to the students how to spot/find and interpret clues in a sentence and then provide sentence frames and visual aids to help in guiding practice.

Section Three

Teaching Technique

Lesson Plan

Approach Effectiveness

teaching technique

Word Sorts:

• This is where students work to categorize words that are given to them into different groups based on the meaning, structure, or function of what a word means.
• This is different from normal or standard vocabulary instruction because it allows students to be more hands-on and also allows for students to work in groups. Activities that are more hands-on have shown to be better learning activities for students.

Lesson Plan

Word Sorts:

• Vocabulary Word Focus: Weather Words
• Grades: 3rd–5th
• Time: 15 minutes
• Content Area: Science / Academic Vocabulary
• Lesson Objective: Students will work together to categorize weather related vocab words based on their meaning and characteristics.
• Language Objective: Students will use their academic language along with using comparative language to discuss and explain their reasoning.

Approach effectiveness

Will this approach be effective?

This approach is effective in supporting and growing academic vocabulary development because it has students work beyond the typical memorizing words and their definition by having them go deeper into learning by analyzing, comparing, and discussing word definitions and the correlations to each of them.