Vocabulary Instruction

I chose to do the morpheme circle exercise with my twelve-year-old daughter.  I drew a circle with eight segments on one side of the paper, then another circle with four segments on the other side of the paper.  In the first circle, I wrote the word "talking" in one of the segments.  Then, I asked her to fill in the other seven segments with words that end in "ing".  She wrote the following words:  struggling, timing, exciting, bouncing, painting, penciling, diving.  Then, I wrote the word " geography" in one of the sections on the reverse side and asked her to write three more words ending in "graphy".  She wrote:  biography, bibliography, and autobiography.  When both circles were filled in, I asked her to write, in her own words, the meaning of each respective word ending.  For " ing", she wrote: "what you put at the end of a word which makes it present tense." For "graphy", she wrote:  " sources, stories, or records of something. "

This was an interesting activity for Kelsey (my daughter).  It helped her understand the terminology in a new way, and on a deeper level.  Though her definitions weren't exactly what you would find in a dictionary or glossary, I think that she did a pretty good job of determining the meanings based on context and relation to the other words.  This activity lets the student take the lead in learning new vocabulary, and we both liked that.  It also led to a great discussion about what the words really meant, and I get the feeling that those vocabulary words will stick with her for a much longer time.

I have to laugh because about now, I'm realizing that I was supposed to do an activity from the text book, not from the e-reading.  (Remember, I told you I have dyslexia LOL). So now, I'll do one from the book too.

I decided to do the vocabulary interview with my daughter.  I told her I was thinking of a landmark somewhere in the world and told her to ask me questions to try and figure what landmark I was thinking of.  First, I had her guess the Great Wall of China.  It was cool, because in the process of guessing the landmark, she ended up learning a lot about it as well.  She asked me questions to determine what continent it was in, what country, what the climate was, the size of the landmark, the color, if it was man-made, etc., until finally she guessed it.  Then, she guessed Angel Falls in Venezuela.  After the activity, she wanted to keep playing, so I let her have a turn choosing the landmark.  I liked this method of teaching a lot and now plan on using it in my future classroom.