Strange as it may sound – lots of teachers over the past few months have come to me with their “Wordle Confessions.”
Their testimonials sound something like this …
“Kristian … don’t judge me … but me and my kids play Wordle at the start of every class … even though it’s not rooted in the curriculum … even though it’s not pedagogical in nature … we do it anyway … and WE LOVE EVERY SECOND OF IT!!”
I’m not the Pope of Pedagogy … and I admit it too … sometimes class gets waylaid by Wordle.
And I don’t see anything wrong in this.
But what these confessions speak to is this – the need to gamify our instruction.
Many of you are familiar with my Plato’s Play-Doh Discussion modality.
Well, I’ve “thunked” up a way to gamify vocabulary instruction.
Ideally, I’d love to pitch this idea to the New York Times Learning Network.
In brief, one way I teach vocabulary is through contextual retrieval.
Students know thousands of words just by being alive. The problem is that they don’t bring them forth. They are sponges, and deep in the recesses and folds of their brains, they have a bevy of great words.
We just need to help them retrieve those words.
I refer to your average run-of-the-mill SAT caliber word as Tier II vocabulary.
As we know, we want students to maintain an academic tone.
What I have done is create a Family Feud and Who Wants to be a Millionaire game that challenges students to dig deep into the “pause” to pull these words to the surface.
As an example, let’s say that we present the following sentence to the class:
Florence had the _____________________ to ask for a raise in spite of three months of dreadful performance.
In asking kids to fill in the blank with a Tier II level word, many students will offer forth words like audacity, moxie, gumption, gull.
I could go on and on about this, so what I’ve done is made a quick video demonstrating the concept.
The first clip illustrates the Family Feud version; second clip is Millionaire.
If you’d like the slides for both gamified vocabulary activities, just let me know.
Here’s the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ClDjXD5zT4
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Happy teaching and happy writing!
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