Vocab-O-Grams (Day 1)

I have been co-teaching with a Grade 7 teacher this week. The teacher has been focusing on short stories and personal narratives. I love the short story "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros and will look for any excuse to introduce this wonderful story to teacher and students. With that as my text, I decided to try a vocabulary activity that I've wanted to try for a long time!

Always looking for engaging ways to incorporate vocabulary instruction, I came across "Vocab-O-Grams". This activity was described in "Words Their Way: Vocabulary Instruction for Middle and Secondary Students"by Templeton, Bear, Invernizzi, Johnston, Flanigan, Townsend, Helman and Hayes. 

These are the directions I gave the students:

Eleven by Sandra Cisneros

Discuss what you know about each of the words.  

Think about how Sandra Cisneros might be using the words to develop her story and write the words where you think they will be used to develop each story element. The words may be used more than once.  

If there are words that your group is not sure about, list them as Mystery Words. Use the vocabulary words to make predictions about “Eleven” and write your predictions in the right-hand column next to the words. 

The students worked in groups of three and had very rich conversations. There was a lot of discussion about the word "onion". Students made connections to "Shrek" and how he had layers like an onion. They also made connections to the book "Holes" by Louis Sachar (which their Grade 6 teacher had used as a Read Aloud last year). 

The predictions were very entertaining! 

At the very end of the activity, I read the short story to the class. 

-Sonja