Vocabulary in the classroom

At first when I read this article I was having a hard time connecting it back to my content area of Art. I was puzzled by the shift in focus to vocabulary instruction in our ITT class, until I realized that the majority of my classmates are Elementary ED folks. They, unlike me, will be formally teaching vocabulary nearly every day!

With that in mind, this is what I took away from the article: Vocabulary instruction is HUGE when it comes to the success of students! It is important to teach vocabulary because vocabulary is directly tied to reading comprehension, and if we want our students to understand what we assign them, then we must be responsible for strengthening and building their vocabularies.

One method to do this that interested me was eVoc Strategy 10: Combining Vocabulary Learning with social service. This strategy detailed a website called freerice.com, free rice is an online game that shows students a word, and gives them four possible definitions. For each correct answer, freerice donates 10 grains of rice to a country in need! How cool is that? As the students continue with the game the word difficulty increases. This is a great tool that can help introduce new words to students with a low vocabulary in a fun an rewarding way. Similarly, it is also great for students with an excellent vocabulary, as the word difficulty increases the longer you play, introducing them to harder and harder words.

Personally, I would love to teach vocabulary with technology by creating short themed videos. The field of Art history comes with many terms, and I think it would be great to make videos showing images and footage of different sculptures and famous architectural elements. If I were to alter the vocabulary assignment we are working on in class currently, I would have my students create short videos defining a particular vocab word in many contexts, as well as acting it out in a quick scene. You can imagine it might be something similar to the 'letter of the day' skits on sesame street.

Other tools that intrigued me in regards to teaching vocabulary were online tools such as wordle, and visualthesaurs.com. I think that these are great resources to have when teaching vocabulary because they offer a more visual narrative of a text. Students can copy and paste an article into wordle, and see what the key words and ideas are of the text. This helps gives students a 'big picture' of what they are learning. Similarly, Visual Thesaurus helps students see the connection between words and their relation to other types of words.