Hello,
lovelies! I am super excited to share this new set of vocabulary charts with you all. Using vocabulary charts within your classroom has so many great
benefits, and they can be used in so many different ways!
Picture-based vocabulary charts
and word walls provide visual support for students which is essential when reading skills are still being developed. If they
are struggling with spelling or if they need a new word, they can head over to the vocabulary wall for assistance. Also, by immersing
our little learners in new vocabulary, we are strengthening their ability
to expand both their writing and speaking skills.
I’m excited to share a whole bunch of different methods about how you can integrate these charts into your classroom.
Ways
to Use Vocabulary Charts
These vocabulary charts come in both a full page and half page size option so that you can use them in multiple ways. There are over 75 different themed charts included which makes it perfect for picking and choosing to fit your needs! Below, I have shared a
few helpful ways to use vocabulary charts in your classrooms.
A
Word or Writing Wall
You can use these vocabulary charts to create a word wall, writing wall or other themed wall. Having a visual word wall provides a reference point for students. When they need a new word or are stuck on spelling a word, they can head over to the word wall and note it down. I used to keep a bunch of mini whiteboards near the word wall, so that students could simply write down the word they needed and head back to their desks.
Also, when putting up vocabulary charts on your bulletin board, a handy tip is to use velcro so that you can easily change out the different cards as needed!
You might even like to use the charts to play games like charades. The possibilities are endless!
Writing
Inspiration
When writing, it can become difficult for students to find a topic for inspiration, especially during a writing unit where students are consistently asked to come up with various topics to write about. You
can use these vocabulary charts as a way to encourage and inspire creative writing ideas. Try
keeping a stack of them in a little basket near a writing center; that way, you
can easily pull out a card to assist with narratives,
personal narratives, or recount writing. Sometimes, all students need is a
little inspiration to help them get going. And, it is great for encouraging them to
construct a themed story based on the provided vocabulary. I cannot wait to see
all the fun writing pieces your kiddos come up with.
Sentence
Writing Center
With
this resource, I have also included a sentence writing worksheet for students
to practice using vocabulary from the charts. Having access to a wider range of vocabulary helps our students with words they wouldn’t
typically use in their writing. This activity would be perfect for Kindergarteners and First Graders.
EAL/D
Support
Themed vocabulary charts also play a crucial role in supporting your ESL students by exposing them to a wider range of words. Aiding your students in learning new vocabulary is critical for English language development. The visual nature of the charts help bridge the relationship between oral and written language. When you provide the pictures and the words, it can also assist in clarifying the meaning of unknown words.
Vocabulary charts can be used in so many different ways, and they can also aid our students in a ton of various capacities. Our goal is to help your little learners become strong writers by explicitly teaching the necessary skills and strategies they need as they continue through school. This bundle can be used with various grade levels and can definitely be differentiated for your classroom needs. These vocabulary charts are no-prep. Just print and go! I can’t wait to hear how these worked in your classrooms, be sure to share your favorite ways with me!
Click on the link below to check them out 
Updated on February 13, 2019
Vocabulary charts come in a wide variety of forms. Using charts can help focus in on specific areas of English, group together words, show structures and hierarchy, etc. One of the most popular types of chart is a MindMap. A MindMap isn’t really a chart, but rather a way to organize information. This vocabulary chart lesson is based on a MindMap, but teachers can use further suggestions for adapting graphic organizers as vocabulary charts.
This activity helps students widen their passive and active vocabulary based on related word group areas. Typically, students will often learn new vocabulary by simply writing lists of new vocabulary words and then memorize these words by rote. Unfortunately, this technique often provides few contextual clues. Rote learning helps «short term» learning for exams etc. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really provide a «hook» with which to remember new vocabulary. Vocabulary charts such as this MindMap activity provide this «hook» by placing vocabulary in connected categories thus helping with long-term memorization.
Begin the class by brainstorming on how to learn new vocabulary asking for students input. Generally speaking, students will mention writing lists of words, using the new word in a sentence, keeping a journal with new words, and translating new words. Here’s an outline of the lesson with a list to help students get started.
Aim: Creation of vocabulary charts to be shared around the class
Activity: Awareness raising of effective vocabulary learning techniques followed by vocabulary tree creation in groups
Level: Any level
Outline:
- Begin the lesson by asking students to explain how they go about learning new vocabulary.
- Explain the concept of short term and long term learning and the importance of contextual clues for effective long term memorization.
- Ask students how they memorize new vocabulary.
- Present the idea of creating vocabulary charts to help students learn specific content related vocabulary.
- On the board, choose an easy subject such as the home and create a MindMap placing the home at the center and each room as an offshoot. From there, you can branch out with activities done in each room and furniture to be found. For more advanced students, choose another area of focus.
- Divide students into small groups asking them to create a vocabulary chart based on a particular subject area.
- Example: house, sports, the office, etc.
- Students create vocabulary charts in small groups.
- Copy student created vocabulary charts and distribute the copies to other groups. In this way, the class generates a large amount of new vocabulary in a relatively short amount of time.
Further Suggestions
- Structured overview organizers can be used to take a closer look at vocabulary items based on parts of speech and structure.
- Tables can be used to compare and contrast qualities between similar items.
- Timelines can be used to focus on tense usage.
- Venn diagrams can be used to find common terminology.
Creating MindMaps
Create a MindMap which is a type of vocabulary chart with your teacher. Organize your chart by putting these words about a ‘home’ into the chart. Start with your home, then branch out to rooms of the house. From there, provide the actions and objects you might find in each room. Here are some words to get you started:
living room
bedroom
home
garage
bathroom
bathtub
shower
bed
blanket
bookcase
closet
couch
sofa
toilet
mirror
Next, choose a topic of your own and create a MindMap on a topic of your choice. It’s best to keep your subject general so that you can branch out in many different directions. This will help you learn vocabulary in context as your mind will connect the words more easily. Do your best to create a great chart as you’ll share it with the rest of the class. In this way, you’ll have lots of new vocabulary in context to help you widen your vocabulary.
Finally, choose your MindMap or that of another student and write a few paragraphs about the subject.
Suggested Topics
- Education: Describe the education system in your country. What type of courses do you take? What do you need to learn? Etc.
- Cooking: Categorize based on meals, types of food, kitchen equipment, etc.
- Sports: Choose a specific sport such as football, basketball or tennis. Branch out into equipment, rules, clothing, special terms, etc.
Posted: November 10, 2012 | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: vocabulary |
On Friday, Marjorie presented a workshop at Teachers College on vocabulary acquisition with Ken Pransky. Ken is the author of Beneath the Surface: The Hidden Realities of Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Young Learners K-6 (https://www.heinemann.com/products/E01202.aspx ) and My Fantastic Word Book: Young Student Thesaurus. The student thesaurus is a wonderful resource for vocabulary acquisition that uses graphics, font size and pictures (the key elements of any good chart) to illustrate useful vocabulary. The words are clustered by meaning or placed on a continuum to show gradations of intensity. The book is currently only available through the Collaborative for Educational Services (collaborative.org), but will also be available from Amazon soon.
Teaching academic vocabulary, or the vocabulary of school, is something every teacher pays attention to, but is often an area of concern, and even frustration, when students don’t seem to internalize and use the words taught each and every week. While immersion is important, it is not enough because the teacher is doing most of the work. Ken Pransky advises teachers, “Never work harder than your students!” and this could not be more true than when it comes to teaching vocabulary. Just think about how much time you spend choosing words, making worksheets, designing crossword puzzles, and grading spelling tests. What are the kids doing? Often they are the passive receivers of all this information, not active participants or creators.
In Smarter Charts we talk about the power of visuals, or the picture superiority effect, for enhancing recall beyond that of words alone, especially when exposure time is limited (and in schools, time is always limited!). Using limited, but strong graphic elements like bolding, font size, and symbols can also make information compelling and memorable. This is why we are so excited by Ken’s My Fantastic Word Book. It makes use of all of these elements to show children how to expand upon overly used adjectives and verbs.
An example of words that describe from My Fantastic Words Book by Ken Pransky.
We have also talked about making things memorable by using music, chanting, and rhyme (Smarter Charts, p. 47-51) just like advertisers do to make their products stick in your brain. Ken refers to the stuff that makes things stick in your brain as “goop” or the myelin sheath. And it is repetition and practice that helps make things stick. Teaching through songs and jingles is one way to do this, and then pair it up with gestures and hand signals to really reinforce the concept or word. During the vocabulary workshop Ken asked teachers to come up with songs using familiar tunes to teach some key academic vocabulary that we often assume kids understand, when in reality they often do not. Here is a song Kat Yanez shared to the tune of “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.”
Infer, so we can make meaning (repeat x3)
We read between the lines.
What can we figure out?
What are these words about?
Infer so we can make meaning
We read between the lines.
Charts can support the teaching of vocabulary by making a visual record of what is being taught and learned. Reading aloud picture books and chapter books is a great way to highlight the power of vocabulary to impact readers, whether narrative or informational, and to anticipate what will be needed to strengthen children’s reading and writing. For example, we often find young writers using very passive verbs in their writing, like “I went to the park” or “I was eating pizza.” So teaching vivid verbs might become one possible vocabulary focus when reading aloud. The chart below is the start of a chart showing three verbs the teacher and the students noticed upon a second reading of Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts. They talked about how the words were used and what the words meant. Then the students were asked to be on the lookout for these words across the day – when they saw them or used them when reading, writing, or talking. One thing that ended up being discussed was how certain words showed up more often or were used more often than others. Using the words when talking is extremely important as a precursor to using the words in writing.
This chart captures some verbs the author, Maribeth Boelts, used to make her writing more “vivacious.”
Shared reading is another component of balanced literacy that can be used to highlight vocabulary and show ways to develop word meanings. One thing that Ken Pransky pointed out was that when teaching children to use context clues to figure out a word, the text should be at a just right level. In other words, children should know 18-19 out of 20 words before having them guess meaning from context. Below are some examples from big books where this has been done during shared reading. The teacher, Kelly Holt, returned to some words that her children did not seem to understand clearly. For example, on the page that said, “You can clean a car.” the children kept saying “wash” instead of “clean.” In this case, it was the syntax, more than the meaning, that seemed to cause some confusion. The teacher used a wikki stix to highlight the word and point to the clue in the picture to show how to figure out what the author meant.
Using the picture to help understand the use of the word ‘clean’ in this sentence.
On another page, it was the meaning of the word that was unfamiliar. Most children had never gone snorkeling or if they had ever seen a snorkel, did not know what it was called. In this case, the teacher was teaching the name of something, but it is not a vocabulary word that is high on the list of important nouns to learn.
The red line connects the word ‘snorkel’ with the picture of a snorkel.
In a second grade classroom, shared reading was used to show children how to use a glossary to figure out word meanings, but to add to it using their own words. In the case of the word extinguish, the glossary defined the word as “to put out.” The children used the picture to add to that definition, saying “to blow out.” Using their own words and understandings helps them to take more ownership of the word.
Placing the glossary definition in context with the text, Fire by Luana K. Mitten and Mary M. Wagner
Interactive writing is another component that can help children become more confident vocabulary users. We often find that children may use certain vocabulary in their spoken language, but don’t use the words in their writing. This is often because they are insecure about the spelling and afraid to take risks. Interactive writing provides a nice scaffold and a safe place to try things out in a risk-free environment. Returning to a familiar big book is a nice way to revisit word choice and consider alternatives. In the book, Fire, illustrated above, the class thought about how information book writers often use very specific vocabulary words when teaching about a subject. With this in mind the students decided to revise the heading of the first chapter, changing the word ‘light’ to the word ‘ignite’ which they had come across in other texts about fire. They also changed the word in the text as well, immediately lifting the level of text complexity. The kids also felt rather superior as a result.
Interactive writing was used to capture the vocabulary revisions made by the students.
Lastly, charts can be used to remind children of the many strategies they can call upon when trying to figure out the meaning of unknown words. Remember, these strategies will be most effective when the children are reading books that are within their zone of proximal development.
The chart above was used often as the children came across words they did not know and were asked to share ways they figured out the meaning. Jamie Mendelsohn at PS 59 M came up with the idea of having a “Sticky Note Day” every Friday with her group of second graders. Each child was given a sticky note and told to be on the lookout for a word they thought was particularly important to understanding the book they were reading. Towards the end of reading workshop they would get together with a partner and talk about why they thought the word was important and what they tried to figure it out. Then the whole class would get together and talk more about one or two of these words.
This is the beginning of a chart that shows an example of how an unknown word was chosen and figured out.
Once again, it is the children who are actively figuring out possible meanings of the words, not the teacher or a dictionary. Kids love being word detectives and feeling smarter as they come to own an increasingly larger amount of academic vocabulary.
We hope to see many of you at the upcoming NCTE convention in Las Vegas. We will be signing copies of Smarter Charts at the Heinemann booth at 2 pm on Friday, November 16th.
Until then, happy charting!
Marjorie Martinelli and Kristine Mraz
Building a larger vocabulary can be tricky work for young readers. It often takes consistent repetition and practice to learn new words and internalize their meaning. As kids develop their vocabularies, they learn many new words on a routine basis. Without knowing the definition of a word, kids might look for clues to identify the meaning. They’ll look for visual cues, examine context, and ask questions to discover the meaning of a new word. But this discovery can be a bit of a guessing game.
With the power of the internet at our fingertips, it’s easy to look up a definition, but what about retaining the knowledge? Recording previous encounters with the new word can help with memorization of the word in other contexts.
Parents and guardians can help kids navigate the confusing work of learning new words through consistent practice. Creating a DIY word chart is a fun way to get kids involved in documenting and practicing new words to grow their vocabulary. The next time you read together with your child, try keeping track of new vocabulary words in a chart. Adding to the chart routinely will build a good habit of looking up unfamiliar words while enticing kids’ imaginations about their meaning.
The Reading Partners curriculum utilizes a word chart template to record new vocabulary for students. Emerging readers get “Word Nets” to capture new words while beginner and advancing readers get a “Wondrous Word Journal” to record new vocabulary words, as well as its definition, context, and pictures.
How to create your own word chart
Feeling inspired to make your own word chart to help your kids learn new words? Here’s what you will need for this project:
Materials needed:
- Construction paper or colored cardstock
- Printouts of our word chart template
- Stapler (or hole-punch if using binder)
- Various supplies for decorations of your choice (markers, washi tape, glitter glue, stickers, etc.) – Optional
- Binder – Optional
Instructions:
1. Print out around five copies of our word chart template. If you’re interested in creating your own word chart, draw a 3×6 grid on an 8.5×11 piece of paper. For each square in the top row, write “Word,” “Definition,” and “Example.”
2. Hole punch your charts if using a binder.
3. Don’t forget the cover page! On a piece of construction paper or colored cardstock, write out “ _____’s Dictionary”. Have your child decorate with washi tape, glitter glue, or stickers.
4. If using the binder, slide the cover page in the front and fill the binder with the hole-punched word charts. If you aren’t using a binder, staple the cover page together with the word chart printouts.
5. When all charts are filled up, add more word chart sheets.
How to use your word chart to learn new words
When your child comes across a word they don’t know, first ask what they think the word means within the context of the narrative. Then, work together to find the word in a dictionary and read the definition.
Have your child write the words in their chart, along with the definition and an example or picture. They can also add a sentence containing the word or quote the passage it came from.
High five and celebrate learning a new word!
When the word comes up in another text, reference the word chart to recall how it was used in the previous context. If your child isn’t able to recall the definition, add it to the chart again with the new sentence.
When your child is able to recall the definition without help, then color the box in to show that they understand the definition of the word.
Feel free to get as creative as you’d like with your word chart, and don’t forget to have fun reading!
Our vocabulary Charts For Kids will help them enrich their English Vocabulary and provide them with the most used English words. We also provide pictures that will help kids learn in an interesting and interactive way.
Your child’s vocabulary- what’s the big deal? Why is it important? It’s kind of amazing really as the research shows that when it comes to vocabulary, size does matter! Vocabulary means knowing and using words. It’s your child’s store of words. It provides the building blocks to language development. And vocabulary knowledge drives the development of grammar.
There’s strong evidence to connect vocabulary with your child’s later language and cognitive development. Having a large vocabulary at 24 months, has been linked to stronger performance on measures of maths, reading, and behaviour at age 5. Your child’s vocabulary growth is considered to be directly related to their overall success at school. The size of your child’s vocabulary predicts her ability to learn to read.
It gives your child the ability to say what he or she means. By having several words at their disposal for describing an event or emotion, they can be explicit when sharing their ideas and opinions.
It helps your child understand what other people are saying and what she/he is reading. Vocabulary is the foundation for comprehension. Unfamiliar words become holes in the text, preventing your child from completely understanding what he or she has just read.
It bolsters their ability to grasp ideas and think more logically. The greater number of words your child has, the more he or she can interpret ideas from others, and express their own ideas.
It boosts your child’s power of persuasion. Having a rich vocabulary will help your child communicate in a more engaging way. Relying on one or two words to describe an idea will be repetitive and not as persuasive, as relying on a vocabulary of 10-15 similarly descriptive terms.
It helps your child make a good impression on others. How articulate your child is constitutes a big part of the impression she or he makes on others.
Without a sufficient understanding of words students cannot understand others or express their own ideas.
Watch a summary on YouTube
Vocabulary is important across the curriculum from language arts and social studies to mathematics and science. It is intimately connected to both effective reading and writing skills, and these skills in turn are necessary for doing well in school.
Samples From the Charts
Research studies have shown that in most cases students have to see, read and interact with words 5-7 times before they are admitted to long-term memory. Words are more easily learned if your child is active – drawing a picture of the word, writing her own definition of it, and thinking of an example sentence to use it in. This is better than simply writing the word over and over again.
Since comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading, the importance of vocabulary development cannot be overestimated. A robust vocabulary improves all areas of communication — listening, speaking, reading and writing.
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