Academic Vocabulary and Word Generation

I was reminded of my favorite academic vocabulary FREE curriculum materials recently and thought they were blog worthy. 🙂

If you have not checked out SERP’s Word Generation curriculum materials (or if you have temporarily forgotten about them) check them out here!

Academic vocabulary trips up a lot of struggling readers, especially in the Content areas. Students learn the content, but when they go to demonstrate what they know in a multiple choice format words like “evaluate” and “conclude” and “infer” trip them up.

How the materials work, in a nutshell:

Each unit is built around a high interest topic, for example, Dating Violence or Do Athletes Deserve High Salaries.

Five academic vocabulary words are taught with each unit.

The unit starts out with a short reading about a topic.The reading level of the materials is fairly low so most students can understand the text. The reading presents several sides to the argument or topic and introduces the five academic vocabulary words.

The next part of the lesson teaches the words and all related words (conclusion and conclude, inference and infer).

Next, there is a Math and Science lesson that utilizes the five words.

The debate is my favorite part of the lesson! Students pick an argument or create their own and have a discussion/debate about the issue. My students absolutely love this. This part of the lesson is crucial as it helps develop their thoughts before the last part of the unit, a writing assignment.

This writing assignment is a persuasive essay about the topic which just happens to mimic the kind of writing that students are expected to do on the Writing SOL test.

There are so many things that I love about SERP’s word generation materials. They already exist- 100% and I don’t have to create anything. They are all high interest subjects and my students have always responded well to these topics. They don’t go in any particular order so I can pick and choose the units I want to teach based on topic or word choice.

There are so many ways a school can use these materials. I used these materials during a reading intervention. The materials could be shared amongst content areas. Social Studies can introduce the words and read the first introductory passage. Math can do the math lesson and science the science lesson. English can do the debate and writing lesson at the end. These can be done in any order. The materials are designed for middle school but can be used for high school as well.

These are fabulous materials and well worth checking out.

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