A concept sort is a comprehension strategy in which students sort new vocabulary into categories.

Interactive “foldables” help students learn new vocabulary through defining, illustrating and using words in sentences.

Guess the Covered Word challenges students’ vocabularies and reading comprehension by requiring them to deduce words redacted from a text.

In this visual strategy, students divide vocabulary words into parts and draw illustrations to represent the separate meaning of each part.

Making Words is a hands-on activity in which students learn how adding and moving letters can create new words.

Students learn the meaning of vocabulary words by writing the word in multiple ways. Students write guided paragraphs about words from the central text then share their writing with peers.

Meet New Vocabulary uses a graphic organizer to help students acquire new vocabulary while reading. This strategy is most effective when teaching challenging, domain-specific words (Tier Three).

My Pile, Your Pile is an interactive word game that increases students’ Tier Two and Tier Three vocabularies.

A personal picture dictionary is an individual vocabulary and spelling resource students make themselves.

These surveys ask students what they know or how they feel about specific words in the text they are reading.

In this semantic feature analysis strategy, students use a grid to show how vocabulary words relate to one another and to conceptual frameworks (e.g., masculine versus feminine).

Students use this tool to identify a word’s meaning, its parts and its opposite. After organizing the information on an illustrated flashcard, students practice using the word in a sentence.

Students predict the meanings of vocabulary words before reading and confirm the accuracy of their predictions during and after reading. Students identify context clues from the text and revise their definitions accordingly.

This contextual redefinition strategy encourages students to use the structure and context of words to predict their meanings. Students arrive at the definition through exposure to increasingly rich clues.

A tableau is a representation of a scene or picture by people posing silently without moving. In a vocabulary tableau, a group of students use their bodies to create a frozen picture of a vocabulary word.

In word cheering, students sing, chant and move to the components of new words.

A word wall is an organized display of vocabulary words drawn from central texts students are reading.

A word wall is an organized display of vocabulary words drawn from the texts students are reading.

Word webs are mind maps that promote active learning and help students develop higher-order thinking skills. Students map their thinking in a graphic organizer based on a Frayer model.

Students use a concept map to organize their vocabulary learning. This tool requires students to define words, find examples, draw on prior knowledge and connect related concepts.