Use the following three steps to help you implement the Vocabulary-Building Movement strategy.
1. Determine and then introduce the vocabulary words you want your students to learn.
2. Introduce students to a series of gesture-based vocabulary strategies. Here are several vocabulary-building movement strategy options you can use (Stobaugh & Love, 2015).
• Use hand gestures—Have students create their own representational gestures, demonstrating the word in concrete ways. In addition, students could design gestures that depict words in a more abstract fashion. For example, students might decide a concrete gesture to demonstrate understanding of precipitation is to hold their hands up high and wiggle their fingers and then slowly lower their hands to emphasize that precipitation falls to the ground.
• Form a group statue—To make it more interactive, assign students to groups and have them use their bodies to represent a word. For example, to illustrate the word conservation, two students could be in the center and the third student could wrap his or her arms around the others.
• Create a model—As an individual or in groups, give students building resources (such as sticky notes, markers, and building blocks) and instruct them to create an abstract model to represent the word. For example, students might make a small tower in which the sticky notes represent the judicial branch (it handles the sticky issues), a building block depicts the legislative branch (it makes the laws, the building blocks of societal rules), and the craft stick represents the executive branch (it has one key figure, the president, leading it).
3. Allow students to choose one of the three ways (hand gesture, group statue, or model) to demonstrate their understanding of vocabulary terms.
Variations
You can use the following variations in association with this strategy.
• Have students create a video where they create dance moves related to the terms they are learning.
• You can vary students’ use of the hand gesture strategy by having them act out their gestures and play a game of charades.
Additional Content-Area Examples
This section provides examples of some ways you can connect this strategy to your teaching in different content areas.
• A language arts teacher instructs students to develop hand motions to represent the meaning of Greek and Latin roots. For example, one group suggests a pulling motion to represent the word tract.
• In a unit on plant biology, a student group creates a gesture of spreading seeds (using hand gestures to gather seeds from a bag and shake them out onto soil) to depict pollination. The group shares aloud with the rest of the class how the gesture aligns with pollination.
• A mathematics teacher assigns students into groups of four, provides each group with building materials, and instructs them to create models related to the geometric formulas in their unit of study.
• In a unit on the civil rights movement in the United States, a social studies teacher forms groups of four students and instructs them to use the group-statue strategy to illustrate or symbolize a concept or term related to the movement. Students then provide three reasons for how their statue depicts that concept or term.
Strategy 2: Inductive Learning
Broadly speaking, inductive teaching and learning are methodologies for engaging students in higher-order thinking. Inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, discovery learning, and so on are all forms of inductive learning (Prince & Felder, 2007). The Inductive Learning strategy focuses on students using inductive learning to group and classify information to build deeper understanding. You can use this strategy as a preassessment to gauge students’ existing knowledge of a topic or as a review to assess their learning.
CLASSROOM EXAMPLE
A teacher hands out twenty key terms involved in the production of a play. These words range from script to center right. He puts students in pairs and groups the words based on common characteristics. Each student pair then creates a descriptive label for each grouping. As a class, students share their ideas and make connections between background knowledge and the groupings they created.
Strategy Steps
Use the following four steps to help you implement the Inductive Learning strategy.
1. Create a list of terms, visuals, or data. When you are developing students’ vocabulary, for secondary students, use fifteen to twenty-five terms. For younger students (grades preK–5), fewer terms are appropriate (around five to ten). The terms you select should be relevant to the ongoing learning in your class.
2. Determine a delivery method for allowing students to see and interact with the selected terms. For example, you could display the terms on a digital wall or provide students with written or printed materials.
3. Have students sort and group words based on common characteristics or shared features, either individually or as a group. Students should identify descriptive titles for the groups of words they categorize together.
4. Conduct a class discussion on how students determined their groupings and what categories they came up with.
Variations
You can use the following variations in association with this strategy.
• Have students brainstorm terms to use for this activity instead of using teacher-provided terms.
• Use this strategy as a preassessment to see if students understand the relationships between terms.
Additional Content-Area Examples
This section provides examples of some ways you can connect this strategy to your teaching in different content areas.
• A language arts teacher gives students twenty pivotal quotes from a novel they have read and asks them to sort and classify the quotes.
• A science teacher selects a list of various animals and instructs students to determine groups and classifications for them. Students consider and discuss each animal’s behaviors, appearance, habitats, and so on.
• A mathematics teacher instructs students to group various shapes based on their attributes.
• In a unit on Native American culture, a social studies teacher instructs students to work in groups and gives each group a box of items representing a specific Native American tribe. Students work together to classify the artifacts.
• A visual arts teacher gives students various pieces of artwork and instructs them to use their existing knowledge to group the pieces according to how they look or appear to look. The teacher uses the students’ results to lead a discussion on art history, color usage, brushstrokes and techniques, and movements in art.
Strategy 3: Matrix
The Matrix strategy exposes students to a variety of perspectives while at the same time assesses students’ understanding of a topic or lesson. The Matrix strategy involves having students examine two variables or ideas and observe how those ideas interact. Each axis represents a variable on a scale of 0 to 10, and students then consider their viewpoint before determining where they would appear on the matrix (see figure 4.1). The strategy provides time for students to deeply think