This week we have had a complete break from any written work in class and have been trying to consolidate the vocabulary that the children have been exposed to in the last 6 months, both in class and in their homework.
As part of the children’s homework each week since last October, they have been asked to find synonyms for certain words that have been highlighted in a passage of text. This way, hopefully they can contextualize a word and therefore have a better chance of learning any words that they aren’t already familiar with. We are well aware that a 10 year child needs to see a new word in context probably ten times before they properly retain the meaning so we are working through our word list of 600 words and repeating them multiple times in homework or lessons to ensure that the students are truly increasing their vocabulary.
Examples of synonyms in context are below:
