September 8, 2008

Homework:
Pictionaries 1-10 unit 1

Today:
Daily Drill
Enter the week's homeworks into the agenda
Handed out vocab books
Began to study unit 1

Today we began our study of 300 vocabulary words. The students have already received their scores on the pre-test (which is actually the vocab final), so they can now begin increasing that score! I plan to give the same test in January.

I study each unit over the course of two weeks. The first two days consist of listening to the words and drawing pictionaries. These pictures should not have numbers, words, letters, or symbols. On Wednesday, we put the drawings on the board and try to guess the vocab word. I try a variety of exercises to help the students learn the words.

Another thing I discussed with the students today is grades. Vocab counts for 30% of their grade: 15% is homework, and 15% tests. If you are interested in the math, let me know, but I explained that a student who does all his homework yet fails every vocab test is able to earn a C+ for vocab. I am more interested in students being exposed to and working with a variety of vocabulary words. Some students are better at incorporating words into their lexicon than others. Therefore, I reward the effort of doing the work over the score on the quiz. It's just what I do.