Whether you’re a seasoned educator or new to teaching, having fresh ways to teach vocabulary to early years students is always a good inclusion for your teacher toolkit. While many children learn the meaning of new words through everyday exposure, simply repeating the word, giving a definition, and adding it to your word wall doesn’t always help the word ‘stick’ for every student.
The Teach Starter teacher squad know that every child learns differently, so they’ve put together a list of engaging and creative ways to introduce new vocabulary in your early years classroom. Keep reading to find out!
Fun Ways to Experiment with New Vocabulary in the Classroom
Did you know? Children need to be exposed to new vocabulary 15-20 times to learn the word and have the confidence to use it in the correct context. With that in mind, we recommend introducing a ‘word of the week’ tactic into early years classrooms to help expand your students’ vocabulary awareness. There are plenty of ways to make your ‘word of the week’ fun and easy to remember, such as tapping into the five senses and getting creative with it.
So, let’s dive into a few ideas:
1. Use a Mystery Box or Bag
Once you’ve decided on your word of the week, pick out some objects that might help your students guess what the word might be. This will not only help students visualise the word but also create an element of suspense and excitement.
For example, your word might be ‘stinky’, so you might pull an old sock out of your mystery box or bag. Hold it to your nose and ask, “What’s a word that I could use to describe this sock?”
You don’t need to go above and beyond with the box or bag itself! An old shoebox or tote bag would do. To add an extra layer of fun, you could decorate it to look like a treasure chest or magician’s hat.
2. Use Your Body
Learning new vocab doesn’t have to be just verbal! If the word you’ve chosen can be acted out to show its meaning, you can encourage your students to mime it using their bodies. For example, your word might be ‘relaxed,’ so kids can show they know what it means by laying back with their eyes closed.
If your word is something that you can physically feel, such as ‘rough,’ you get students to take off their shoes and to feel the rough pavement or rocks beneath their feet.
3. Put it in a Sentence
When teaching new vocabulary, it’s a good idea to put the word into a sentence structure and read it aloud to students to give them further context for when and how to use it.
Once you feel your students have a fairly good grasp of the word, turn it up a notch! Get your students to come up with their own sentences, which must include the word. This will help them put what they have learnt into practise. Once finished, you can display all of the sentences for other students to read.
If you’re stuck on kid-friendly sentence ideas, our word of the week collection has a bunch of resources to help you define them for your students.
4. Find the Word in Books
Let’s play Where’s Wally but with words!
Engaging with new vocabulary through children’s literature is also another fantastic way to further enhance your student’s knowledge of the word in another context.
Once you’ve got a list of new words to learn, take a trip to the library to get a bundle of age-appropriate books to use. Encourage students to take a book each and read through it to find the specific words. To raise the stakes, you could challenge students to a friendly competition – the first one to find and tick all the words on the list gets 10 minutes of extra playtime!
5. Hold a Word Scavenger Hunt
After introducing your class to a bunch of new words, a great way to further reinforce them for students is to challenge them to a scavenger hunt.
To start, hide the words throughout your classroom. We’re thinking of word wall cards, book titles containing the word, and objects that represent the word. Then, give students some clues and let them find the hidden words around the classroom before they say the word out loud and use it in a sentence.
6. Create a Meaningful Display
It’s important to revisit other words that the children have been exposed to as well, so creating a word wall with a twist is helpful. One way to do that is by creating a word wall that has meaning for the students in your class.
For example, if your students really engaged with the old sock for the word ‘stinky’, attaching this sock to the display with the word stinky will create that connection for your students.
7. Play Vocabulary Bingo
This is another fun and easy way to review new vocabulary.
Start by creating bingo cards containing the new words you just taught your students in each square. Then, call out the definitions for the words. Students mark off the word that matches the definition until they have completed a row and can yell out, ‘Bingo!’
8. Have a Relay Race
If you want to ramp up your vocab lessons with a bit of physical education, this idea might be for you!
Set up a word wall at one end of your classroom and divide your class into small teams. From the opposite side of the classroom, one team member runs toward the wall and grabs a vocabulary card to take back to their team. The team then has to correctly define the word and use it in a sentence. Continue the game until all words on the word wall have been claimed by the teams.
9. Explore the Senses
We’ve mentioned some of the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) throughout this article, but you could explore them further by completing an activity that focuses on the five senses and evaluate which of them applies to each new word.
One way to do this is through a graphic organiser to divide up the five senses. You could draw one big table on the whiteboard to complete as a class or print off individual templates for each student to complete.
10. Play Vocabulary Pictionary
Fancy a game of vocab dictionary? Let’s go!
This super easy game will help kids learn new words while expressing their creative side. To start, get your students to form pairs. One student draws a picture related to the word, and the other student has to guess what it is. The pairs take turns so that everyone has a chance to draw and guess.
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