Semantic Gradient & Vocabulary

Hi All! I am so excited to see you all in action with your blending boards!  Thank you to Chaunte for providing some training and to PVES for suppling ALL our teachers with their very own boards!

I know we are still finding our comfort zone with our small group reading but these blending boards are going to be sooooo helpful with high frequency word mini lessons, vocabulary & phonemic awareness!  

Remember with the Simple View of Reading, we need to ensure that our students have a strong understanding of decoding and language comprehension before we get to independent reading comprehension.

Our new blending boards will help support us with the decoding and word recognition part for sure. 

Let's talk Language Comprehension!  

Basically, language comprehension is understanding and making sense of the spoken language. Remember the ROPE!  

Along with our blending boards, we can also support the Simple View of Reading by explicitly teaching the  vocabulary from texts that we are using in small group & large group reading.  

Mrs. Allen shared this awesome vocabulary activity that I think would work perfectly in your small group reading.  It is called Semantic Gradients!

• This activity helps to broaden and deepen the students understanding of related words. 

• It helps student distinguish between shades of meaning.

• It enhances students vocabulary! 

It is pretty simple.  Choose 2 words that are the opposite of each other and place them at either ends of a line.  

Choose 5 synonyms for each word. 

Create a bridge/line in between each word and add the synonyms to connect the words.  

Students can also take the words and place them on the bridge between the words and discuss their reasoning.  

Allow time for them to discuss the relationship between the words.  

Check out this example below!

This activity can be done with Book vocabulary too!  

Teachers can choose a specific vocabulary word.

Use the text to create a list of similar words. 

(Place your word in the center of your bridge.).

You can read more about this activity over at Reading Rockets!

I SOOOOO see paint samples for this activity!!!!  Instead of a bridge create a ladder!  I can see these put on rings for students to use during their independent writing time.  Click below to see this free activity on TPT.

OMGOSH!  How fun is this!!!!  I love the idea of kiddos using What's my Word game after they have engaged in semantic gradient activities!  Grab the FREE activity sheet and read more about this activity and others over on Education to the Core!   

Getting your students to be comfortable with "playing with words" will support their decoding, encoding & vocabulary!