A few weeks ago I had the idea to incorporate sports into a vocabulary review. Many of my students play basketball on a team and/or play at recess, so I incorporated basketball into our review. My son received this over the door basketball set for Christmas so we brought it to school one day. He told me to "make sure they don't break it, but you CAN show them how to dunk it." Although I didn't share my dunking skills, my fifth graders LOVED this!
I knew they'd notice the goal as soon as they walked in so I wrote a little message beside the board: "Are you ready for vocabulary basketball?"
It was a fun way to review vocabulary in an engaging way. We split into two teams. I had the vocabulary words written on the board and I'd call out definitions. If they told me the correct word, they earned 1 point for their team. Then, they could earn 2 points or 3 points by making a basket. I had ribbon on the floor to show what would count as 2 points vs. 3 points. They had a BLAST!
Most of our vocabulary words come from our read alouds, but most of the words in this unit were student generated. I kept a sheet of paper that students could add words to as they read independently. If they found a word they didn't know or one that they thought would be a good vocabulary word, they could write it down.
Vocabulary review - basketball style - was a HIT!