Illustrating Vocabulary

I've heard of a lot of good ideas for creative vocabulary activities recently, at Edcamp and on Edmodo. (Using selfies to illustrate emotions, for example.)

My middle school students are working with descriptive adjectives right now, and I had them select a few of the adjectives and illustrate them. Many of my more artistically inclined students chose to draw the images themselves, but they could also find photos and images online or cut them from magazines and newspapers. This was a required assignment for 6th grade, and an optional extension activity for 7th and 8th, who were finishing up another project.

Here is the assignment sheet and rubric that I used.

(One very artistic student illustrated the adjectives using all Harry Potter characters.)

Students who submitted digital illustrations were able to present them to the class, and those who turned in hard copies of their illustrations used them to create a pretty fabulous word wall in the classroom.

 

I have used student examples during bell work to practice recognizing the adjectives, which has been more engaging than just using my own examples.

I'm curious to see the results of this week's vocabulary quiz, especially the for the students who didn't do so well on our last assessment but who really got into the illustrations. I think that students' enjoyment of any activity is a pretty good indicator of its success... or at least how likely students are to do it in a timely manner. (Assignments that are fun to grade are also more likely to be graded in a timely manner.)

I'll definitely be using similar assignments in the future. Any other ideas for creative vocabulary assignments?

A Personal Language Toolbox: Learning Styles and Vocabulary Practice

One of my big goals as a language teacher is to teach students how to be language learners. I want to differentiate my own lessons to a wide range of language levels, student interests, and learning styles, but I also want to teach students how to adapt information in a way that will make it connect with their own personal learning styles and language goals.

A coworker directed me to the Birmingham Grid for Learning, which is a 40-question online survey using Gardner's eight multiple intelligences. Especially for visual  learners like myself, it was fun to see everything mapped out on a colorful wheel. Each person's results produce a code (you can see mine below), and the results page allows you to post a whole list of codes so you can view the averages of the whole class, and averages by gender.

I had my students take this test online and either print the results or give me the code via Edmodo. Next week in class I will show them the class averages, and talk about ways we can adapt our class practice to fit the learning styles we have in the class.

This year, I also created the following chart for my students. They can check off their strengths to see what kind of a learner they are, and then see some ideas to practice vocabulary that might work best with their personal learning style. (The actual google doc is here, if this embedded document looks wonky on your screen.)



Thanks to my Edmodo colleagues who already gave me some input on strategies to include for each learning style. Does anyone else have contributions? I am especially looking for more ideas for Logical/Mathematical learners (which is not my strength) and for Naturalistic learners, a relatively new addition to Gardner's theory. (Turns out that this has been part of the theory since the 90's, but even a decade ago all the multiple intelligence tests I was using as a peer tutor were apparently from slightly older materials.)