This is a visual approach to exploring and developing relationships between concepts that can take multiple formats including the "network tree" and can be adapted to suit the needs of students of all grade levels.
What is a graphic organizer?
100
This tier is made up of basic, high frequency, everyday words, such as: house, dog, street.
What is Tier 1 of Vocabulary Instruction?
100
An activity that allows students to relate words conceptually to one another.
What are Concept Circles?
100
This vocabulary building procedure includes students nominating words to research, researching them, and then presenting them to the class for discussion. It ends in a student generated wordbbank.
What is VSS or Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy?
200
This bound morpheme can be added in front of a root word to add meaning.
What is a prefix?
200
This approach to vocabulary involves students organizing words into categories. These categories can be provided by the teacher or determined by the students.
What is a Word Sort?
200
This tier is made up of content/subject; low frequency words such as: acute, ecosystem, germinate.
What is Tier 3 of Vocabulary Instruction?
200
An activity where students use context clues to figure out unknown words.
What is a Cloze passage?
200
These include footnotes, italics, boldface print, charts, graphs, and etc...
What are typographic clues?
300
The suffix that is added to the word "breath" to change it from a noun to a verb.
What is "ing"?
300
This "writing-to-learn" approach has students engage in a freewriting activity in which they explore their current knowledge about a vocabulary word.
What is word exploration?
300
At this level these are the words students need to know prior to instruction
What is Level 1 - Critical "Before" words?
300
An activity where students match definitions, letters and numbers to come up with an equal sum across the game board.
What is a Magic Square?
300
This provides a framework for organizing information while defining a word including: the general class and category of the word, comparisons, distinguishing attributes, and examples or illustrations.
What is a CD (Concept of Definition) Word Map?
400
The arrangements of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.
What is syntax?
400
This vocabulary strategy provides a list of vocabulary words and allows students to rate their level of familiarity with each one.
What is knowledge rating?
400
At this level, these are the words students may need clarified once the text has been read.
What is Level 3 - Critical "After" words?
400
An activity that encourages students to insert their opinions into a blank space in a sentence and be able to justify their opinion.
What is an OPIN?
400
This is when the author reveals meaning of an unknown word by providing additional information in the form of phrases, clauses, or sentences.
What is a direct description?
500
This concerns the meaning of words, both on their own and within a passage.
What are semantics?
500
This extension of brainstorming activities has students organize the word they came up with into categories and create category labels?
What is list, group, label?
500
This tier is made up of words that are high frequency, academic words that are more likely to appear in text rather than speech, such as: emerge, tweak, and navigate.
What is Tier 2 of Vocabulary Instruction?
500
An activity where students analyze similarities and differences in words.
What is a Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA)?
500
This is when the author pairs the unknown word with familiar synonyms or closely related words in a series.