Our first question, after students have logged their grades is, "Who's leading vocab strategy today?" Almost all of the time we have a volunteer, but occasionally we have to ask a student. Sometimes they lead for the extra point that comes with the role; however, most of the time the students who volunteer like being in charge, like to own their learning. Every day we have a class period where students are jockeying for the leadership role. If neither wants to acquiesce, we usually suggest that both volunteers assist in the process.
Every day we have a vocabulary word, taken from a content area, and the students have been taught various strategies to break down the word, creating meaning, along with a graphic organizer to provide the visual. They find key words in the definition, read the model sentence (provided for them) to understand the word in context. Then, they go about the process of identifying synonyms or use the textbooks to find related words, depending on the strategy format.
It's pretty cool to see students directing their classmates to the thesaurus on each table or hearing them remind their classmates to "hop on dictionary.com". Sometimes the words that they find lead them to dictionaries, since we don't write down words that we don't know. Everything must have meaning. One word leads to the next.
When they find the four required synonyms, they each draw a picture on their graphic organizer, a nonlinguistic representation, to activate more brain activity, intended to cement the word meaning. We know, however, that we need repeated exposure to claim these words as our own, understand and know how to use them. We have a strategy for that, too!!
