Monday, March 10, 2014

Vocabulary Book Review

As an ELD teacher, I am teaching way more vocabulary than I ever have before. I have found this book to be an invaluable resource. It combines vocabulary with writing skills, creativity and presentation -- a win, win, win for any ELD classroom. I can't recommend it enough!!

So far I have tried the selling a word (persuasion) strategy and the news story strategy (who, when, what, where, why), and both of them worked very well. Remember that these are students who don't like to write -- but they were able to do this and do it well enough to teach their classmates. Their retention was very good based on a quick assessment the next class period. The nice thing about it is that I let their peers assess how they've done -- if they know what the word is, they pass, but if the students can't tell me what the word meant, the authors go back and make their definition better -- real world instant feedback.

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