Paperless Vocabulary Practice

Let's talk about Vocabulary practice. When I first started teaching my team had some wonderful vocabulary foldables that they found on Teachers Pay Teachers. It is a great foldable and if you're interested you can still download it for free from Teaching with Motherbird.
Alright, Paper-Haters,

Product by Teaching with Motherbird

These foldables caused so much stress for me, not because they are bad because they aren't! They are actually great. They just ended up all over my room. Students did not keep track of them; it took them forever to finish.  BUUUTTTT... I really liked the concept of the students writing the word, writing the definition, using it in a sentence, and creating a visual reminder

After a couple of years, when I started to find myself as a teacher and started to be more confident to do things differently than my colleagues, I started to realize that digital was the way to go for me.

There are two ways that I love to do vocabulary. One of them is free if your school has Google Classroom (GOOGLE!) or Edmodo (or a similar platform). The other does cost money but was so worth it to me, which was Pixton! Today we'll talk about Google Slides (or Powerpoint).

Google Slides

"Slides" is one of the apps of the G Suite that, if you are not familiar with, closely resembles our beloved Powerpoint. The reason I like using Slides or Powerpoint for these kinds of assignments is it is easy for the students to click where they are supposed to type and just start typing. They do not have to do any formatting and they are less likely to mess up the layout that you have for them. I will be talking about Google Slides, but understand that you can do this similarly with Powerpoint.

Pre-creating the Assignment

In most of my teaching career, I have had students that need a LOT of scaffolding with assignments. I cannot just give instructions that they should have each vocabulary word, with a definition, sentence, and picture. It ends up just a mess. It is important to have the assignment sort of "pre-made" so the students just have to fill in the pieces. If your objective is vocabulary practice, then that is where the focus should be. If the students have too much tech figuring out to do, then it is no longer a vocabulary assignment; now it's a computer assignment.

I found that having blank text boxes for each field that the student needs to complete helps the students because they can just click and start typing. (TIP: If you are labeling what should go into each box, make these a separate text box so that the boxes that will be used by the students still just click and go.) See a super simple, no-frills example of what one of my slides might look like:

Like this and don't want to start from scratch?

Get your FREE copy here with the template already made into a master slide so that you can add as many as you need!

This link will prompt you to make a copy in your Google drive.

When creating your template:

1. Be sure to have labels separate from the boxes they will type in (as said above).
2. SPECIFY that students should not just do a google search using the vocabulary word to find a picture... They need to be CREATING A PICTURE. This is the one part that you will probably need to have your students know the tools a bit. I have seen kids create AMAZING visual representations just using the shapes and lines tools.
3. Before sending the template out to the students, make sure you have the number of slides ready that they will need (if it's five words a week, there should be five slides that have the template ready to go).
4. If you know how, I would make the template a Master Slide so that if ever the students have to add a new slide, they can click the + (add slide) button and have the same template ready to go (not having to mess with copying and pasting slides...) 

Want more stuff like this freebie? Don't forget to follow me on my Teachers Pay Teachers Store for more like this! 

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