Vocabulary Bulletin Board
Submitted by: Miriam Lowenstein
This idea came from the book Middle School Bulletin Boards by Judy Hierstein, published by Instructional Fair, TS Denison ISBN 1-568-22548-2
The title of the board is "Vibrant, Vivacious Vocabulary" I did each word of the title on a separate line and made the letters quite large. I chose an expressive font and then enlarged it on the copy machine. The words were printed on white stiff paper and then mounted on florescent line green stiff paper. The background paper on the bulletin board was purple. The idea was vibrant. It grabbed your attention.
I ran off sheets to be filled out with the following information. Each sheet took up half of a sheet of copy paper.
Word (here have a long box to write the word in)
Pronunciation ________________________________
Part of speech________________________________
Definition___________________________________
__________________________________________
Used in a sentence_____________________________
__________________________________________
Origin______________________________________
___________________________________________
These papers were in a box on the shelves next to the bulletin board. When a new word came up either that I used and the class didn't know, or if a new word was in our read-aloud, or one came up in another lesson, one student would look up the word in the dictionary, fill in the information, inform the class by putting it on the board for them to copy to their vocabulary sheets, and finally, sign her name on the bottom of the word sheet that she submitted, and pin it to the board. The students waved their hands to be the one chosen to be responsible for the word.
This board stayed up for a couple of months and I was surprised how successful it was. The students would stop and actually read the words. I think this was more to notice who submitted the word, but still the words got reviewed. Also, the students enjoyed seeing their knowledge of new words accumulate in such an observable way. Visitors to the classroom found it an interesting site and stopped to read a few as well. Anyone who used on of the words correctly orally or in writing got an extra credit for vocabulary.