I love spending my valuable time at professional development. And I'm not even being facetious. For the past few years, my school has implemented a form of professional development that allows teachers to work on our own Individual Learning Plan (ILP). (We need more acronyms in education, don't we?) I've spent time working on concept-based units, integrating curriculum to the Common Core, and now this year strengthening my vocabulary instruction. I'll be sharing instructional strategies that work for me here at Teach Happy and look forward to the feedback that follows. The Iowa Core states, “Without prompting, they [college and career-ready students] demonstrate command of standard English and acquire and use a wide-ranging vocabulary.” However, other than a brief stint with vocabulary workbooks, I have never been very intentional with my vocabulary instruction. I knew I need to, though, and I am privileged to work at a school that allows me the time and resources to work on that weakness. This past week I used one of my favorite vocabulary activities in two of my classes, English 2 and College Composition. (I also work in a 1:1 school, so when possible, I try to use technology to enhance my instructional strategies.) English 2 students worked with words in context from our current unit on characterization, and College Comp students worked with some popular SAT words. I want students' knowledge to go beyond just studying for a vocabulary test, so for this activity they worked on owning the words by creating an animated dialogue using GoAnimate.com. GoAnimate is a great choice for this project because we can log in for free with our Google Apps accounts. (We also laugh a lot during this activity because of the monotone voices and computerized accents, and as the title of this blog states, happiness is welcome in my classroom. I'm always amazed at how engaged students are when creating these short little videos.) Tips:
What do you think? Would you like to use dialogue animation for vocabulary instruction in your classroom? What other vocab activities have been successful with your students?
1 Comment
Katie
10/7/2014 05:10:39 am
This is a great lesson and the animations are great. The students did a nice job!
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