Vocabulary using Active Involvement

We are excited to have added Rebecca Silverman and Anna Harnanft’s new book Developing Vocabulary and Oral Language in Young Children (2015) to our arsenal of vocabulary tools.  In it, Drs. Silverman and Harnanft share several activities for reinforcing vocabulary including “Example/Non-Example,” “Related Words,” and “Double Jeopardy.”

All of these activities require active involvement on the part of the student, which research supports is a “must” if we want students to “anchor” and truly own new words.  These games and activities help students prune and/or expand their understanding of the new vocabulary words so that they have a deeper and broader understanding.

In Example/Non-Example,” students hold thumbs up or thumbs down for each word the teacher/SLP offers for a newly-learned term.   For older students, this might look more like, “can veto laws, can make treaties with Senate approval and can issue executive orders” and thumbs down to “writes laws” if studying “Executive Power.” 

For an elementary example, if the term is “vehicle”, students would hold thumbs up for “airplane, train, scooter,” but would hold thumbs down for “playground.”

In “Related Words,” connections are made between new words, and words already in the vocabulary “store”. By building connections, we help students store and retrieve vocabulary more effectively.  In this activity, young children would brainstorm (and a bubble map could be drawn on the board or on paper) words that go with the new vocabulary (e.g., vehicle). The teacher or SLP would help demonstrate how these words can be further organized by subcategory. For example, “car, crash, plane, train, subway, boat). 

For older students, this might be useful for demonstrating types of shelters (temporary, permanent) to include vocabulary such as apartment versus condominium, teepee versus tent, or mansion versus shack.

In “Double Jeopardy,” students anchor understanding of multiple-meaning words, while having to formulate questions.  A board is set up, similar to the game Jeopardy. Students answer questions such as, “A word that means two things: a flying animal and sports equipment you use to hit a ball.” The student must think flexibly to retrieve the question: “What is a bat?” 

We are so excited to see how much focus is being placed on the important skill of developing vocabulary.  Get creative, and engage in cool activities like these ones, rather than just having students memorize definitions on index cards. They will thank you, and their vocabulary stores will broaden and deepen!