Word Cards: Collecting and Reusing Vocabulary Throughout Your Year

When students create word cards they go deeper into the significance and uses of a word, and accumulate a tangible “deck” of vocabulary words—satisfying evidence of progress as the pile grows throughout the year. Word cards take time, so selections should be limited to words critical to current reading. Troposphere might be an important word to a study unit on weather, accomplice for a crime novel, and obsolete for a unit on industry. To create word cards, ask your student to write the word at the center of an index card, filling out each corner of the card as illustrated. Download a Word Card example in PDF format.

Return to these cards (shuffle the deck each session) and use the words regularly and in different contexts to make efforts pay off. For our example, obsolete, here’s a follow-up conversation you might provide: Okay Jason, if I go through my desk drawers, I’ll find some obsolete stuff—like old checkbooks from banks in other cities. What obsolete stuff do you hang onto?

Group adaptation: As each student accumulates a personal word deck, allow him to share with peers, drawing cards and creating new contexts for using the word during group meetings. Students will pick up additional words from each others’ collections.

Word Trees: Mapping Relationships From Root Words