Quick and Easy Vocabulary Discussions

I don’t believe I’ve ever had a student this eager to know what a vocabulary word means:

Me: “From which would you be more likely to avert your eyes—a kissing scene or a bloody scene?”
Student: “Wait! Wait! What did she ask? What does that word mean?”

In the moments before class started one day this week, inspiration struck. I try to introduce or review a couple of vocabulary words at the beginning of each period, and quizzes in both 10th and 11th were coming up, so we were in review mode, but I was feeling blah about all of our usual review activities. Suddenly I had a memory of last year doing bus monitoring, and how the elementary kids loved to play “Would you rather…?”  I glanced over the word list, and I saw many possibilities for my own variation.

It works for content vocabulary that comes from our reading:

• Which do you find more abhorrent—spiders or snakes?
• Who is more obdurate—you or your younger sibling?

It works for literary terms that help us talk about our reading:

• Which genre is more likely to have a dynamic character—mystery or romance?
• Whose memoir would you rather read—a person from history or a contemporary?

I pose the question, give students 5 seconds to consider it, then ask for a show of fingers—option 1 or option 2? After that, they have a minute to defend their choice to their table groups. If students don’t know what the word means, they suddenly have a felt need to know—not because they’ll get a bad grade on the quiz if they don’t, but because they’ll get left out of an exciting discussion if they don’t. One key: it works best if there’s not one right answer, as long as they can defend their answer. This hits so many targets for students, in addition to vocabulary review—it’s an engaging bell-ringer activity, engenders discussion, requires support for an answer, and builds community as we learn interesting things about each other.

And bringing us full circle to connect vocabulary to the bigger picture of writing, a student asked in a final draft reflection this week, “How can I use a small amount of words to describe something that I want to say?” One of my suggestions was, “Keep growing your vocabulary—as you have more precise words, you can use fewer.”