My students are encouraged to expand their vocabulary in my class. Not only do we have a new vocabulary word a week, I also have a bulletin board that celebrates my students' attempt at higher level vocabulary. Click HERE to see how I use this incentive bulletin board. In order to train my students to love words as much as I do, dictionaries and thesauruses are always visible and accessible in my classroom. This year, I also subscribed to Thinkmap's visualthesaurus.com. Part of the reason I love this website so much is because it gives a visual interpretation of how words are related. I also enjoy the fact that students can move words around; and specifically for my ELLs, each word can be pronounced for the students with a mere click of a button. Here is a screen capture of what it looks like. Notice that the right side of the screen indicates the part of speech of the words, in this case, I've looked up the word relate.
To help my students learn how to use these tools, I've created a worksheet that they can use. This year, it's just a sheet that I put in their center, but next year, I think I'll create a notebook for synonyms and high-value words. In the link below, I've put this FREEBIE in my Google Docs. It's called Thesaurus Hunt. See if there is anything else in the folder you find useful. Please comment and share this link if you found it helpful.
It can also be found on TPT as a free download. Click on the image below to go to the product in my store. There are a few freebies there, but some great products for purchase.
No comments :
Post a Comment