Section 7
Vocabulary
grouping
1) Arrange them into groups or sets of three. Which words most
meaningfully belong together in a group of three because
they are most linked to each other in contextual meaning?
2) Arrange them into three or more groups according to students’ own classification system. This can then be followed
up by asking students to arrange them into a different set of
groups.
Grouping can also be a powerful way for students to process
and understand the connection between words. We might give
students a word list such as this one below (about Where The
Wild Things Are).
Max
childhood
identity
The Wild Things
frustration
gender
The Mother
control
compare
The island
temper
loneliness
journey
emotion
need
symbolises
powerful
escape
anger
relationships
landscape
represents
passing time
care
3) Arrange under headings that the teacher provides such as:
Feelings, Story Elements, Characters. This can then be followed up by giving students a different set of headings such
as: Problems, Solutions, Help.
After this activity, students might be given an open ended
prompt or question such as modeled in the previous chapter or
given a series of more focused questions to answer about the
topic which link to the vocabulary they have been thinking
about. Students will write better, more detailed answers if they
have had an opportunity to process vocabulary first.
There are a number of things students could do with the words
in this list:
14
Section 8
Vocabulary hives
The idea comes from a number of teachers who have been experimenting with how to implement the SOLO taxonomy of
John Biggs
(http://www.johnbiggs.com.au/academic/solo-taxonomy/). What
this technique is all about is scaffolding students to explore the
connection between words and ideas in complex and subtle
ways. We give students a bunch of hexagons, each with a word
or phrase on it and ask them to connect the hexagons in a way
that shows the relationship between the ideas. On the next page is an example as shown on the blog Learning
Spy (http://learningspy.co.uk/2012/01/28/hexagonal-learning/).
The shot on the top shows the hexagons about Macbeth initially
given to students. The shot on the bottom is an example of a
hive that one group of students created.
15
Clearly this strategy can be used to help students process vocabulary - it’s a more nuanced version of the flowgram activity
discussed in a previous chapter.
Students can use the hexagonal procedure to show the relationship between vocabulary words in a topic, to link concepts,
ideas and characters in a text and even to plan essays. Students could first cluster the hexagons into 3-4 groups based
upon links they identify between the ideas. Students would then
need to mark out the key word or idea in each group and this
somehow would need to connect with the key word or idea from
other groups - thus creating one whole hive. Students would
then have created a visualisation of a complex essay.
16
Section 9
Vocabulary word
grids
Below is an example of a word grid on Where The Wild Things
Are.
Max
Frustration
“Be still”
Control
Symbolises
The Wild Things
“gnash their terrible
teeth”
Max’s Mother
Relationships
This is an activity that supports students to practise using new
terms.
1. As a teacher, you create a 3x3 grid. In the middle of the grid
you write an important idea or concept.
2. On the outer square you write terms that are connected with
the central idea or terms that can be used to describe the central idea.
3. Students then need to create sentences on this idea. They
start by using the three words in the top row only. They must
make a sentence from these three words. They can add
other words, change the order, and modify the words to better make sense in the context.
We can adapt this basic word grid procedure to help students
explore vocabulary and spelling rules in a number of ways.
The below word grid (about the short film Friendsheep http://vimeo.com/33776370) offers students a range of versions
of each word each box in the word grid. For each row, column
or diagonal - students could write two different versions of the
sentence, using different forms of each word.
4. After this, they do the same for the words in the second row
and then the bottom row. They then do the same for each of
the columns and the diagonals.
17