How to admin. vocabulary.....

I teach 5th grade. I give my students 15 words a week. For now, I am giving them words for the SS test. Here is my problem....

I don't want to waste classroom time having them look up the words every Monday, in our class set of dictionaries...

How can I briefly introduce to them the words on Monday and them have them look up the words??? My problem is I don't want them to all have diff. definitions...

I thought of creating a work sheet with a list of def. and a word bank...then having them do for a hw, match the words with the def..with the help of a dictionary....

A friend of mine thinks that's bad practice and that I should do something with sentences, which would provide context clues....

any thoughts????

tia.

Re: How to admin. vocabulary.....

I teach 5th also and give the children 10 words a week and on Wednesday we have a quiz on the words. When the children are taking the quiz, I put the new words on the board. Vocab definitions is always Wed. night homework. The first two weeks, I showed them how to look up two words, define them and they had to do the rest on their own. We check them on Thursday, we discuss their def. and I give them the def. that I have. On Thursday night, I give them a worksheet with 10 sentences and they have to plug in the correct vocab word - therefore they can see how the word is properly used in sentence. Finally on Monday night, they have vocab sentences, where they have to make up 10 original sentences. I collect their notebooks and check them every Tuesday and make corrections or have them redo if necessary. The test is on Wed. and the cycle begins again. Doesn't take up to much whole class time. Hope this helps.

Re: How to admin. vocabulary.....

I also give it has homework. In my case, I have them create their own definition to the word to get them THINKING about what the word means and then they look it up in the dictionary.

Re: How to admin. vocabulary.....

Thanks for the feedback!


Do you think that my orig. way is considered "bad practice"?

creating a work sheet with a list of def. and a word bank...then having them do for a hw, match the words with the def..with the help of a dictionary....

Re: How to admin. vocabulary.....

In fourth grade, I give them the vocab definitions on the overhead and they create index card flashcards for them.
Toward the end of the year, I wil get them to look up the words in their books.

For their vocab quizzes, I do the word bank or matching. I think you can do a variety of ways, depending on what your kids can handle.