This last year, my team and I worked HARD to get our kids ready for not only the state test, but our rigorous programs in fourth, fifth and sixth grade. We use the Wonders teaching curriculum, which has great stories to go along with the common core standards, but isn't always the most organized when it comes to close reading. We also use Spalding Spelling and Shurley to teach parts of speech and sentence structure. While this last year was a huge learning curve for me, I learned so much! One area we reflected back and identified a need for more direct instruction after receiving our state testing scores is ELA vocabulary terms. Everyday, we go over math vocabulary terms but we do not go over vocabulary terms. So, I set out on a mission! My teammate found a list of vocabulary words recommended by our state testing - ISAT, and I also looked up other words, and looked back and thought about terms that our kids struggled to remember this year. I came up with about 150 vocabulary words to go through over the course of the year. Now, I won't hit all these words daily. Just like everything else we do at our school, it will be done in a spiral format. I will start with the first five words of set 1 and cover those on day 1, day 2 the first 5 words of set 2, etc... So, by the end of the first quarter, they will have heard all of the words at least 5 times (with the words at the beginning of each set being added to every time we go back, so once you've covered the first five words of all four sets, you go back to the first set and do the first 10, then the first 15 and so on and so fourth) . It's what we do to teach math vocabulary and it works wonders!
In each product, there is: a list of all words included, student vocabulary cards with and without pictures to help jog the memory, and a PowerPoint slide show to review slides everyday.
I don't post the cards in the room for the students to see for a few reasons - I want them to memorize the definitions in order to use them when it comes time for end of the year testing, and I just plain don't have the wall space!
I am so excited to use these products! I cannot wait to see them in action, and know that they will work wonders...
To see them on TPT:
To see my teammates math vocabulary:
