Are vocabulary words a struggle for your students? Check out this cognitive engagement strategy that will soon become one of your students’ favorite activities.
It is well established in the education community that movement helps with learning. More specifically, a movement that connects to learning helps with memory and recall. While this strategy is great for all age levels, the younger the student, the more important it becomes. By helping students to make a concrete connection to an abstract idea through vocabulary dance, students are better able to remember and recall the content vocabulary in question.
I would be willing to bet you are already using motions to help your students with vocabulary. For example, my students would act out the weathering, erosion, and deposition process. We would stand up tall and “break down” for weathering, “flow away” for erosion, and then “drop” for deposition. This quick vocabulary dance was one my students repeated throughout the year. I could even see them doing a mini version of it while taking their assessment.
Vocabulary Dance Steps
This strategy couldn’t be easier, but there are several ways to use it.
First, you need to determine the vocabulary words for your unit. These words may be from a book you are reading or your content, either will work.
Next, you and your students create a movement that links to the words themselves. These movements might be a hand motion, a whole-body motion, or even a group motion. Each word will have its own unique movement.
Then, practice the words and movements. You may choose to have a short phrase to say with the movement.
When you first start using vocabulary dance with your students work together to come up with motions, but as they get used to the strategy, have students work in partners or small groups to create their own dances.
A great way to use this strategy is to assign each group a word, have them come up with their own vocabulary dance, and then teach it to the class. This gives students further ownership of their learning.
Modifications for Vocabulary Dance
A strategy this simple means there is lots of room for modifications.
If you would like to incorporate some technology I would recommend having students record one another’s vocabulary dances. These recordings can then be linked to a QR code and placed on a word wall with the words for students to scan and review. I imagine this would also make an excellent bulletin board that other classes could visit.
Another idea is once your students have created their motions they could play charades throughout the year to review their vocabulary words. This would be a great sponge activity for when you find yourself with just a few minutes before you need to transition, and students love it!
A final idea would be to challenge students to link up multiple words through the vocabulary dance to create a bigger idea or explain something new. This challenge extends students’ thinking and encourages further learning beyond memorization.
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