I'm kind of embarrassed for them

I don't think my students quite understood what I meant when I said, "I will scan the pages that you make into a pdf and upload it to a sharing site so that you - and others - can access it." Personally, I think that is clear and unambiguous. My students did not quite get it, which, I think, explains why their pages look like something escaped from their pens and died on the paper. Well, perhaps that's a little harsh. Most of them are legible.

Optics Visual Dictionary

This was my first attempt at making an online visual dictionary with my Level 2 Physics class. They chose a word from a list I generated; in a perfect world, they would generate their own list from a pre-reading activity. Allowing the students to choose their own words worked well. Some students tried to pick a word they thought would be easy, but they turned out to be deceptively difficult. You should have seen the student who picked 'upright' as his word; it was a vexing task for him.

The biggest problem with this, I think, was that the students just didn't realise that when I said that I would upload it, that meant that I would be sharing it with other people. I trust that next time will look a lot more organised.

Adjectives, or the most sumptuous and delectable post ever

My daughter, aged six, has an inordinate love for adjectives. I approve. Her favourite adjectives right now are 'adorable' (applied to babies, mostly) and 'sumptuous'. The last one has me a little confused, as I generally use 'delectable' and 'toothsome' for food I like. I think she picked it up at school.

Some of my time at school is spent on adjectives. Just this week, I made the first part of a visual dictionary of optics with my Level 2 Physics class. It contains adjectives such as 'real', 'virtual', 'upright' and 'inverted'. You have no idea how much trouble a simple concept like 'upright' caused. The finished product does not contain the word 'erect', but only because I was particularly vigilant. I now just have to check the rest of the entries and scan them - I wanted to use the computers, but they were all booked. How irritating.

A lot of the explicit vocabulary work I have been doing lately with the Level 1 Science and Y10 Science classes, however, has been concerned with verbs. I have been using a lot of starters that focus on learning outcomes and learning verbs. At Level 1, some of this has been associated with the learning outcomes for the standards on which the students are working (even though we teach according to the curriculum, the students still need to understand the achivement standard specifications from the NZQA). At Y10, a lot of it has been to do with students understanding - and, hopefully, making their own - learning outcomes.

SLO Wordle Activity

Above is the Level 1 document. The number of students who weren't quite sure what verbs were was not quite a huge as I had anticipated. This was encouraging.

Plastics Learning Outcomes Starter Activity

This Y10 starter activity proved a little more difficult. Not many students spotted that the verb was always the first word in the learning outcome. Fortunately, those that did tended to shout it out at the top of their voices, so everyone soon knew.

I don't, in general, print starter activities like this off. I usually put them on the projector and get students to write down what they think they need. We informally assess it by students getting the whiteboard markers and coming to the board to write their answers up. It works for us.

Science is full of big words

My students have an unfortunate hatred of 'big words'. For example, this morning, they expressed their loathing for such words as 'covalent' and 'polyatomic'. Of course, they also hate being explicitly taught vocabulary. Sometimes, dialogue in my class looks like this:

Students: You're using big words!
Me: Okay, let's learn some vocabulary
Students: Learning words is for babies!
Me: You said you didn't understand these words
Students: We should be learning Science!
Me: Okay, let's learn some Science
Students: We don't understand these big words!
Me: You said you wanted to learn Science

Of course, there is a lot more hand waving. Also stamping of feet and huffing. Possibly some shouting.

The thing is, I have tried teaching new vocabulary in a range of ways. I have tried making visual dictionaries that students add to each time we learn a new content word. I have literacy Do Now activities that involve definitions, example sentences, and cloze activities. I have tried keeping an online glossary on the class site (there was so much complaining about this one). I have tried posters. I have tried embedding vocabulary on purpose into learning. Students hate it, even though they know they need it.

Anyway, I am continuing with my literacy Do Nows, since five minutes of vocabulary seems a lot more palatable than a longer chunk. Here are some things I do, from very low level to quite high level:

Unscrambling letters to make words (visibility of words)
Matching related words and identifying what they have in common (topic-specific words)
Matching words to definitions
Matching halves of sentences that show vocabulary words in context
Cloze activities using vocabulary words
Differentiating between the Science meaning of a word and its common meaning
Creating a picture or diagram to illustrate a word

Anyway, now that I have reminded myself that I do actually do things that help literacy, I feel much better