Vocabulary Teaching Resources

Build your students' vocabulary skills with printable worksheets, cloze reading activities, task cards and more elementary school teaching resources designed to help extend and improve your students' vocabularies.

This extensive collection of teaching resources has been created by teachers for teachers like you. The curriculum-aligned collection includes word-of-the-week activities, teaching presentations and more to save elementary teachers time on lesson planning.

Created by expert teachers, each resource in this ELA collection has been carefully reviewed and curated by our team. That means it's ready to use in the classroom! You'll even find editable resources, plus differentiated options.

New to teaching this part of the ELA curriculum, or just looking for fresh ways to engage your students? Read on for a primer from our teaching team!

What Is Vocabulary?

It may seem obvious, but let's start at the beginning.

In an elementary school context, vocabulary can be defined as the set of words that a student is expected to know and understand. It includes not just the words themselves but also their meanings, spellings and how to use them in different contexts.

Teaching vocabulary at this level focuses on developing a strong foundation of language skills, which will serve our students well as they continue to learn and communicate.

Vocabulary Teaching Techniques

Teaching vocabulary at the primary school level involves various techniques to help students learn new words. Some of those include:

• Providing definitions and examples of words
• Using visual aids to help students understand new words
• Encouraging students to use new words in their writing
• Teaching students to use context clues to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words
• Teaching students strategies to decode new words they encounter, including the introduction of common prefixes, suffixes and root words

Students need both explicit and implicit vocabulary instruction in primary school to learn new words as they will build a strong foundation of words, not just by picking them up while reading and listening to others, but also through direct instruction.

Teaching Vocabulary in Elementary School

Teaching vocabulary for the first time? Here are some topics you can expect to cover, depending on your grade level:

• Basic high-frequency words
• Vocabulary related to specific subjects
• Words with multiple meanings (and how to use them in context)
• Synonyms and antonyms
• Prefixes and suffixes
• Root words
• Words with irregular spellings and pronunciation

Vocabulary Teaching Ideas and Activities

Looking for some ideas to get your students excited about vocabulary? In addition to the teacher-created resources in this collection, here are a few favorite ideas from our teacher team!

Erase a Word Pronunciation Challenge

In this pronunciation game, you can select word lists related to current units or use a high-frequency word list to improve student vocabulary.

Supplies

• 3 whiteboard erasers
• Vocabulary list(s)

How to Play

1. Break students into three teams, and have them stand in lines in front of your whiteboard.
2. Write three lists of words onto the board — one list in front of each team.
3. On the teacher's signal, the first person from each team goes up to the board and reads aloud one of the words on the list.
4. If they get the word correct, they erase it and go to the back of their team's line.
5. The winner is the first team to erase all the words on their list.

A-Z Vocabulary Relay Race

This is a fun, physical vocabulary game that is great to play outside or in a large multi-purpose area. Students play in teams, racing to complete a list of words (one for every letter of the alphabet) around a familiar topic or theme.

Supplies

• pens or pencils
• paper
• tape

How to Play

1. Divide students into mixed-ability teams of 4 to 5 students.
2. Students stand in a line on one side of the space. On the other side of the space, place a pen or pencil and tape to the ground a sheet of paper with the letters A-Z listed down the side.
3. Choose a topic that the students are familiar with. This will be the theme for all the words the students write on their A-Z list. Alternatively, you can choose a unit you're currently studying as your topic.
4. The race begins with the leader running to the paper and writing a word beginning with the letter A that is related to the theme. Once they've written the word — spelled correctly — they run back to their team.
5. The next team member runs up to the paper and writes a word beginning with B, before running back to their team so a teammate can go up to write a word starting with C, and so on.
6. If a student cannot come up with a word, they can call a friend to help. If they still can't come up with a word, they can call the teacher for help.
7. Teams continue this word relay until they have written a word for every letter. The first team to complete their word list (and have it verified by the teacher!) are the winners.

Snake Words

In this game, students work in teams (similar to the A-Z relay detailed above) to create a word snake on the board. Students have a limited time (e.g. 10 seconds) to write their word or their team risks being eliminated.

Supplies

• 4 -5 different colored whiteboard markers or chalk
• a timer or stopwatch

How to Play

1. Split students into 4 to 5 mixed-ability teams of equal numbers.
2. Have each team select a leader and send them to the classroom whiteboard.
3. Team leaders should take a colored marker and stand in a line.
4. The teacher begins the game by writing a letter of the alphabet on the board and starting the timer.
5. The first team leader writes a word beginning with that letter and must complete the word within the time limit. For example, if the teacher wrote the letter G, they might write galaxy. Then they hand their marker to the next person on their team.
6. The second team leader uses the previous word's last letter as the next word's first letter, also within the time limit. Using the example word above, the next student may write 'yogurt.' Then they hand their marker to the next person from their team. Note: Students write the words without spaces, in essence creating a word snake. E.g. galaxyogurt
7. If a student cannot come up with a word within the time limit, they can pass it to the next team member, but you should set a limit to the number of passes each team can have. After this, the team is eliminated.
8. The last team standing is the winner!