Building Vocabulary Skills & Confidence

I used to play a game with my friend Laura as a little girl. Her mom would give us a stack of official looking documents and we would highlight the words we knew, count up the number we had highlighted on the page and congratulate the winner on their superior intelligence.

I found out years later that these papers were old college essays that her mom (a prof) was recycling. What better source of language than first year psych!

As I was working with a grade one student today, that game came back to me. I was reading The Boxcar Children Graphic Novel with him and we began a game called “what word am I saying.” In this game I would say a word and he would search the page for it. It was a difficult game for him, though, as he is in french immersion and struggles with spelling.

I wondered if I would bring that old highlighting game back to build his confidence.

Here is my plan:

1. Photocopy several pages from a phonics reader or graphic novel.

2. Ask students to highlight the words they know. Don’t worry if they highlight words they don’t know the first time.

3. Write the vocabulary words on cue cards. Play a game where two people flip over a cue cards to reveal a word. Whoever calls out the word first wins the card (if you are playing against a student, give them a head start by flashing the card at them for 3 seconds before putting it down where you can see).

4. Next, go back to the story and read a sentence out loud to the student(s). Ask the student(s) to look for words in their pile of cue cards that match the words they hear you reading. For example, “What a great idea.” If students have “what” as one of their cards, they will put that card aside.

** Alternatively–    Create a BINGO card in which students fill in the blanks with the words from their cards and listen as you read, trying to get three in a row. Free PDF: WORDS I KNOW BINGO 5. Challenge students to take a page home, highlight the words they know, create a BINGO sheet or cue cards and test themselves, a friend or family member.

While I played this game with a young learner, it can easily be adapted to middle school and beyond. Follow the steps above with a more difficult text or with math/science concepts.

Be sure to leave a comment below talking about how this lesson worked in your own learning environment 🙂