Level 3: Receptive Language

Working on Vocabulary Skills is another important area to target with our verbal and higher functioning students.  Teaching synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and homophones are critical language concepts for our students to learn and understand.  These concepts help continue to expand our students’ word knowledge and use.  Increasing a student’s vocabulary knowledge also improves reading comprehension and writing skills.

Classroom Ideas

Anchor Chart – Create an Anchor Chart to hang up in the classroom for the students to refer to and use during language lessons.  Provide the definition of each concept and examples.  You can even create the anchor chart with your students as you teach these concepts and have the students help come up with examples for each of the concepts.

• Synonyms – words that mean the same thing
  •          Examples:  big/large, close/shut, happy/glad
• Antonyms – words that have opposite meaning
  •          Examples:  open/close, clean/dirty, wet/dry
• Homonyms – Word that sound the same and are spelled the same but have different meanings
  •       Examples:  park/park – park the car, play at the park, bat/bat – hit the ball with the bat, the bat flew         in the cave
• Homophones – Words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meaning
  •    Examples:  ant/aunt, blue/blew, red/read, two/to

 

Word Wall – pick different synonym, antonym, homonym, and homophone vocabulary cards to hang up in the room each week.  Here are some great cards from LakeShore Learning that would be perfect to use in the classroom.  You can choose a set number of cards to hang up each week and review daily.

 

Activities/Games

There are lots of fun activities and games you can play with your students to practice these vocabulary concepts.

You can use synonym, antonym, homonym, and homophone cards to play Memory or Go Fish using those different card decks.  Memory can be challenging because the students are not matching the exact same cards but need to know what concept they are working on in order to know what card will match his/her target card.  For example; while playing synonym memory the student turns over the card with the target word “glad” on the card.  The student would tell me he/she needs to find the word “happy” to match his/her “glad” card.  You can either use cards with pictures or with only written words.  You can play Memory for each different vocabulary concept.  The same goes for Go Fish.  The student says what card he/she has and then asks a peer for the target word he/she needs.  For example: “I have a baseball bat, do you have the animal bat?”  Again, you can either use cards with picture or just print out the vocabulary words you want to focus on and use those in either game.

Here are some great vocabulary board games from LakeShore Learning.  You can also use other board games you have and have your students pick a synonym, antonym, homonym, or homophone card before he/she takes a turn in the game.  Again, you can always print out pictures and/or words to create your own vocabulary decks.

Grab & Match- These card tasks are great to use with your students.  There are lots of different cards sets for your students with each set.

Writing Tasks

Have the student pick a homonym or homophone and draw a picture of the 2 different ways you can use the word.  Then have the student write a sentence about each picture and highlight the target multiple meaning words.

Have the student read a simple story with 3 terms highlighted in the story.  Have the student provide a synonym to fit in the story.  You can even have the student rewrite the story.

Check out our Synonym Snapshots Unit! It is loaded with task cards, puzzles, and an I have, Who Has Game!