Dictionary Skills {FREEBIE}

Have I told you that I am currently working as an Acceleration Teacher with 4th and 5th grade small groups?  No?!  Well, I’m so sorry!  I think I forgot to mention it.  This fall I started a new position where I work with the big kids.  I pull small groups for ELA and go into classrooms to work with students.  It’s really been such a blessing, but oh so different from 2nd grade.

First of all, the supplies I need right now are so minimal that they can basically fit into one bin!

And I find myself sitting on the carpet quite a bit with students surrounding me.  We may be reading a book, working on a skill, or playing a game, but we spend most of our time huddled together on the ground 🙂

To soften the blow to our knees and elbows, I found these garden kneeling pads on Amazon.  They have worked wonders!  The kids just grab one and put it wherever they need to be more comfortable.

You can find the Garden Kneeling Pads HERE (or at dollar stores)

Let’s move into a skill we just finished working on… DICTIONARY SKILLS.  Since I don’t have ANY 4th and 5th grade ELA resources, I went looking for some fun things for us to do during our small group time.  Here’s what I found:

We used Dictionary Skills Task Cards from Literacy 4 Kids as a Warm-Up.  We went through a few of these each time we met so that we would  be comfortable answering questions about the dictionary.  The glasses do nothing other than make things a little more fun.  Students put them on so they can “look closely” for text evidence.

Glasses can be found:  HERE, Clipboards:  HERE

We also played lots of games!  Games 4 Gains has a TON of great games for all different grade levels.  These dictionary skills games were PERFECT for my groups!  We worked on the terms, guide words, abbreviations, etc.  I put everything into dry erase pockets so that we can use expo markers rather than counters.  It made things super simple.

Dry Erase Pockets:  HERE, Foam Large Dice:  HERE

After lots of practice, we played a HUGE matching game together.  I created 12 dictionary skill terms, examples, and meanings.  Here’s what that looked like:

I placed all of the cards around the room… just picture them all over the floor, counters, etc.  The students could choose ONE card at a time.  They had to bring it up to our carpet and match the term, example, and meaning.  They could NOT grab another card until they placed it in the correct place.

We played it a couple of times, trying to beat our time from before.  This really helped my kiddos THINK about what each term meant and see examples of them.  What I love about these is now I can place them on an anchor chart or bulletin board for reference.

If you teach Dictionary Skills, you can grab my matching game FREEBIE HERE.  I think it could work for several different grade levels… just pick and choose which terms you want to focus on 🙂

{Amazon Affiliate Links were used in this post}