Vocabulary

• Reading Comprehension: You can't understand what you read if you don't know the words; vocabulary is the bridge between decoding and understanding text.

• Communication: More words allow for more precise, nuanced, and confident expression of ideas, improving both verbal and written communication.

• Academic Success: Strong vocabulary is a key predictor of overall school performance and achievement, even in later grades.

• Cognitive Growth: Learning new words expands your understanding of the world, improves thinking, and makes learning new things easier.

• Subject-area vocabulary: Students will encounter and need to navigate complex, multisyllabic, and technical vocabulary across all subject areas. 

• Build a Word Conscious Home: Get your child excited about words, learning new words, and using new words in conversations. 

• Use Big Words: Children are capable and competent. Don't shy away from using big words with children. 

• Read Together: When you read together, take the opportunity to focus on new and exciting vocabulary you find in books. 

• Play Audiobooks and Podcasts: Listening to stories allows children to hear words that might be above their current independent reading level. It builds their "auditory vocabulary," making it much easier for them to recognize those words later when they see them in a book. 

• "What's Another Word For...": During car rides or walks, pick a simple word like happy or mad and see how many synonyms you can come up with as a team (E.g., Happy: Joyful, ecstatic, content, thrilled, etc.). 

• Board Games: Traditional games such as Scrabble, Boggle, Pictionary, Articulate, and Scategories all help students build vocabulary development.

• Vocabulary Bookmarks: Make a vocabulary bookmark where your child makes a list of new and exciting words they encounter when reading at home. 

• Tic Tac Toe: with a twist. Put vocabulary words in the squares. When you play, if you want to put an X or O somewhere, you have to read the word and say the definition. If the definition is wrong, you can't put your X or O there. 

• Charades: with a twist. Write each vocabulary word on a small piece of paper, fold it up, and stick it in a hat or jar. Take turns by pulling a vocabulary word from the hat or jar and act it out. No talking allowed. The winner gets a point. 

• Flashcards: Use NotebookLM (for students 13+) to produce vocabulary flashcards with the word on one side and the definition on the back. You can play this game two ways: first, read the definition and then guess the word. If they guess correctly, they get a point. Second, read the word side and then guess the definition. If they guess correctly, they get a point. 

• Word Chain: This game tests previous vocabulary that they've learned. Provide a category like ‘fruit’ and then provide one word in that category like ‘peach’ and because it ends with h, the next word has to be a fruit that starts with h like ‘Honeydew fruit’ and that ends with t, so the next student has to think of a fruit starting with t, like ‘tangerine’. 

• Use the Words Again: After learning the new vocabulary words, encourage the students to use the words throughout the day. If a student uses it in a correct way randomly, during a history lesson for example, I give them a point! 

• From A to Z: This is great for subject-specific vocabulary. In 5-8 minutes, you have to write down a word related to a topic for every letter of the alphabet. For example, if the topic is cells, “A” might be “apoptosis,” “B” might be “binary fission,” “C” might be “cytoplasm,” and so on. For many topics, students might struggle to find a word for every letter (and sometimes you will too). You can support them and/or allow them to get more abstract or silly.  

Digital Games & Resources