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“Vocab.”
Have you heard colleagues, pre-service teachers, and students use the term “vocab?” Have you watched students cringe inwardly when they hear it, as they assume there will be a session of copying definitions from a textbook or Google? Lately, strategies for teaching subject-specific vocabulary has been a topic of discussion on teacher communities around the Internet. certainly, students need a command of subject-specific terms to communicate about the subject. How will they get this skill without copying vocabulary words into their notebooks? Like this. Follow along.
It’s all about context. Students need to connect the new terms to knowledge they already have, use the term in context and then find a real-life situation to apply the new learning. A few simple steps will help students do this.
They first, often subconsciously, pull up the memory of an image, experience, chart, graph, related topic, video – whatever. Then, they need to connect this new term. Finally, they can apply it to something in the world around them. An image, familiar object, experience, place they’ve visited, video they’ve seen, again, it doesn’t matter so long as the connection becomes clear and coherent.
But what if students are struggling with making the connections?
Enter hexagonal thinking.
Using terms written on hexagons, students link the terms to other terms and explain the relationship between the terms they have linked. You can write the terms on the cards, type them on a template, or use write the terms themselves on index cards and lay each card on a larger-size hexagon card. (more on index cards later.)
During this process, students