Dictionary Skills {FREEBIE}

Have I told you that I am currently working as an Acceleration Teacher with 4th and 5th grade small groups?  No?!  Well, I’m so sorry!  I think I forgot to mention it.  This fall I started a new position where I work with the big kids.  I pull small groups for ELA and go into classrooms to work with students.  It’s really been such a blessing, but oh so different from 2nd grade.

First of all, the supplies I need right now are so minimal that they can basically fit into one bin!

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And I find myself sitting on the carpet quite a bit with students surrounding me.  We may be reading a book, working on a skill, or playing a game, but we spend most of our time huddled together on the ground 🙂

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To soften the blow to our knees and elbows, I found these garden kneeling pads on Amazon.  They have worked wonders!  The kids just grab one and put it wherever they need to be more comfortable.

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You can find the Garden Kneeling Pads HERE (or at dollar stores)

Let’s move into a skill we just finished working on… DICTIONARY SKILLS.  Since I don’t have ANY 4th and 5th grade ELA resources, I went looking for some fun things for us to do during our small group time.  Here’s what I found:

We used Dictionary Skills Task Cards from Literacy 4 Kids as a Warm-Up.  We went through a few of these each time we met so that we would  be comfortable answering questions about the dictionary.  The glasses do nothing other than make things a little more fun.  Students put them on so they can “look closely” for text evidence.

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Glasses can be found:  HERE, Clipboards:  HERE

We also played lots of games!  Games 4 Gains has a TON of great games for all different grade levels.  These dictionary skills games were PERFECT for my groups!  We worked on the terms, guide words, abbreviations, etc.  I put everything into dry erase pockets so that we can use expo markers rather than counters.  It made things super simple.

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Dry Erase Pockets:  HERE, Foam Large Dice:  HERE

After lots of practice, we played a HUGE matching game together.  I created 12 dictionary skill terms, examples, and meanings.  Here’s what that looked like:

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I placed all of the cards around the room… just picture them all over the floor, counters, etc.  The students could choose ONE card at a time.  They had to bring it up to our carpet and match the term, example, and meaning.  They could NOT grab another card until they placed it in the correct place.

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We played it a couple of times, trying to beat our time from before.  This really helped my kiddos THINK about what each term meant and see examples of them.  What I love about these is now I can place them on an anchor chart or bulletin board for reference.

 

If you teach Dictionary Skills, you can grab my matching game FREEBIE HERE.  I think it could work for several different grade levels… just pick and choose which terms you want to focus on 🙂

{Amazon Affiliate Links were used in this post}

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Hi, I'm Amy

Hey, y’all! My name is Amy Lemons and I am passionate about providing students with both engaging and effective standards-based Math and ELA lessons.

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