Vocabulary Activity for good readers

[Bea]

Hi everyone,

I am working with a 5th Grade boy who has excellent word recognition but doesn't understand as well as he reads. He'll be in 5th in the Fall. He didn't understand the meaning of a short story because he didn't know what deviant meant and said he'd never heard of belligerent and couldn't pronounce it. That was the only word he couldn't pronounce, though.

I need to come up with 2 short stories and strategies to help him determine the meaning of unknown words (context clues didn't work when I had him reread the sections). One has to be a vocabulary strategy. Does anyone have activity that you have used and saw great results?

He loves baseball, football, b-ball, Star Wars, Spiderman, The Hardy Boys, The Boxcar Children, and his favorite subject is Science (from his Interest Inventory).

Thanks for any tried and true strategies/activities and articles or short story suggestions.

Bea

[AW2245]

I've had good luck with a word map. I usually provide a sentence w/context clues for the student to get an idea of what it means, then they have a box they write synonyms and another box for antonyms. They then write examples of the word and non-examples of the word. I've found this to be much more effective than "looking it up in the dictionary" Good Luck!

[javamomma]

We did this activity in Marcia Tate's brain based learning workshop.

Very similar to the above poster, make a chart with synonyms and antonyms and have the student do a picture to help them remember the word.