Teaching Vocabulary Activities

Teaching vocabulary activities is a wonderful way for young people to learn the basic skills needed to get ahead in school and in life. It all starts with the most basic of activities, memorization. Word association games are the fundamental building block for this technique. A teacher would employ a recognizable subject, say “occupations” and then ask the students to fill in the gaps. An example would be “fireman”… a fireman uses blank, blank and blank in the course of their day putting out fires and other tasks that make our world safer.

 Teaching Vocabulary Activities

Building on memorization, the next most popular activity would be comprehension. With this activity, the students are pushed to a higher level of learning that employs other cognitive areas of the brain. The thinking process starts to really take over here as it becomes obvious who is using their brain and which ones are left idle.

As we move through the different activities, one common denominator held in high value is repetition.  We humans are creatures of habit and so it goes with our teaching vocabulary activities that repetition is an integral part of learning and understanding the meaning of new words.  Sentence formation that makes sense will only take place after a thorough understanding by the pupil through memorization and comprehension.

 Teaching Vocabulary Activities

At this point, teaching vocabulary activities would now move to other word games that include synonyms, antonyms, and other word association analogies.  When the pupil has demonstrated a thorough understanding of the vocabulary at hand,  closure games are often employed where sentences and paragraphs are constructed with key elements missing.  The student that has learned his or her vocabulary well, should not have much difficulty filling in the gaps.

Even though times change as evidenced by this classroom of the 1950′s, some things transcend all time barriers and remain the same.  The core skills necessary for teaching vocabulary have not changed very much over the decades and so it goes today that these same sound techniques will be employed to enrich the lives of today’s students.

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