Teaching vocabulary, superfun?

Teaching vocabulary in my year seven is all about being creative- or doing it the old fashioned way by writing lists and learning by heart. A lot of my students just aren't very perceptible for anything- all they want to do is chat, play with slime and gloop or have play time. Tempting as it was, I decided I didn't believe copying definitions from the dictionary would be the most effective way of learning for my students (easy and convenient for the teacher as it might be...) and started planning a different way of doing it.

However, Halloween was booming around the corner, and we were going to start a story telling topic, focusing on gohst stories. The choice of activity I made was reading and writing gohst stories as a way of learning and using new vocabulary in a motivating and meaning bearing activity for the students- I hoped.

Monday morning arrived, I was ready for a full day of gruesome stories in four different groups of students. I had prepared for all eventualities with a variety of texts, pictures, texts on ipads and sound files for those strugling to read text. 

I started off by introducing the structure and aim for the lesson, both writing it on the board and sharing on the pads, using iThoughts to visualize the criterias on which they would be assessed on. The criterias for the lesson were to listen when I read, read themselves, make notes of difficult new vocabulary and put a line under as they continued to read, tell their learning partner what the story was about and explain new vocabulary to each other if they could or look them up in the dictionary if neither of them understood them. This lesson was very popular with the students, they all enjoyed reading and listening, debating and explaining. I was at periods surplus to requirements, and most of the time I just listened in to their conversations and supervised on pronounciation of new vocabulary.

In the next lesson we started up by repeating the ghost story, talking about what vocabulary was used in a ghost story and made a word bank on the board consisting of nouns, verbs and adjectives needed to write a short Halloween story. The students were then to start writing their own ghost stories after the following criterias; Having a beginning, middle and end on their story, remembering to write in full sentences, use the the past tense of the verb and write in the right sequence of events. Boy, were they writing ( or making sound files)! We ended up having 25 students eager to read and show their story to the rest of the class.

In the end five students read their own story to the class, and we decided to make a booklet of all of the stories. They recieved assessment on their work both verbally and written after I had collected the pads. 

This topic and this way of workun really caught on with them, regardless of abilities, and they were all very active and eager to produce their own piece of work. In focusing on the structure of writing and the verb tense we achieved texts that were more thought trough and where most of them had paid more attention to detail. I believe it was of importance that the criterias were made clear, and I also believe that by reading and working on authentic texts they learn vocabulary that they would not necessarily pick up from a Textbook. They made use of the vocabulary both in reading, explaining, making word banks, writing and retelling their stories, and the activity was something they enjoyed doing.