Open Sort
Lindsay Manzella
This week's EAL strategy is vocabulary learning strategy. This strategy isolates lists of critical target vocabulary that can be compared and contrasted (e.g., the characteristics of the three branches of government, monotheistic religions). Students work with a partner/group to sort the vocabulary into two or more categories. The categories are not named by the teacher. Students must determine appropriate titles for each of the vocabulary categories. There may be more than one choice of category title for any group of academic terms. This strategy is great for getting students to use critical thinking and higher level thinking as they make connections between the words. We recently tried this activity in Grade 7 Humanities during the World Religions unit.
Some tips for making this activity successful:
Here are the directions we used to make the activity clear for students.
This week's EAL strategy is vocabulary learning strategy. This strategy isolates lists of critical target vocabulary that can be compared and contrasted (e.g., the characteristics of the three branches of government, monotheistic religions). Students work with a partner/group to sort the vocabulary into two or more categories. The categories are not named by the teacher. Students must determine appropriate titles for each of the vocabulary categories. There may be more than one choice of category title for any group of academic terms. This strategy is great for getting students to use critical thinking and higher level thinking as they make connections between the words. We recently tried this activity in Grade 7 Humanities during the World Religions unit.
Some tips for making this activity successful:
- Use this strategy AFTER you have already taught the words and the students know them fairly well.
- Limit the number of words that you use. If there are too many words the activity could take a long time, especially if students have forgotten the meaning of words.
- You can use Quizlet to easily size the words in a grid that students can cut out.
- You may want to make some categories off limits. For example, in the Monotheistic Religions word sort, we didn't let students use Islam, Christianity, and Judaism as categories because it was too obvious. We wanted them to make connections between the three religions and to be creative.
- Encourage students to write on the poster to show connections, add words that they need that were not on the list, and make headings for the categories.
Here are the directions we used to make the activity clear for students.
