Fun Way to Learn New Vocabulary What's in a Word?

Students love to find words they've never seen or heard of before. A fun way to put their curiosity to work is directing them to search for high level words in their textbooks, class sets, or any library books. Once they have found several, they will write the sentence containing the words in context, predict what the word means, then look it up in the thesaurus or dictionary. After they have learned what the words really mean, have them make up three other sentences using the words in a meaningless, nonsensical way. Now the competition begins! Ask your students to take turns reading a sentence to each other and guess which one uses the word correctly. The winner is the team of students which guesses the most correctly written sentences after everyone has had an opportunity to read. This activity will be beneficial in the following ways: Number one, it exposes your students to more vocabulary to include in their compositions; and secondly, it helps in the area of Reading with word meaning. Have a bodacious time!