Having Fun And Learning Lots Of New Words With Vocabulary.com At Van Meter

Our students and teachers have been enjoying a new website to all of us at Van Meter.  It is called Vocabulary.com.  

                          

A few months ago I met the wonderful people at Vocabulary.com and have been sharing it with our school community ever since.  According to their website....
                           
Vocabulary.com is the easiest, most intelligent way to improve your vocabulary. It combines an adaptive learning system (The Challenge) with the world’s fastest dictionary (The Dictionary) so that you can more quickly and more efficiently learn words.

                            
On Thursday, we invited my friend Georgia from Vocabulary.com to connect with our 5th and 6th graders as they learned about their personal account and all of the in's and out's of the website.

Their teachers Kate Goodwin and Jean Birks, along with myself, wanted to learn so much more about it too.

The 5th graders brought their iPads (some grabbed a laptop when they came into the library too) and the 6th graders brought their MacBooks.

Georgia and the teachers created accounts for each students before our connection in the library, so they all logged into their own account.

It was such a fun connection and so meaningful for the students and teachers.

After our connection, I asked Georgia to share her thoughts to include in this post too.  This is definitely a website that no one wants to miss because it brings so much to the young people that we all work with.

This is what Georgia had to share....

One of my favorite parts of my job is showing Vocabulary.com to people who could never imagine that you could learn words in a new way. Usually, I introduce the site to teachers, but Van Meter super-librarian Shannon Miller gave me the rare opportunity to directly present the site to the true judges of what works: her 5^th and 6^th grade students.

I began by showing the students around the Vocabulary.com Dictionary, and the Van Meter students noticed right away that it’s no ordinary dictionary. It explains words in a friendly, memorable way that kids can understand, AND it allows you to enter the words you are looking up into your learning program.

When students started playing Vocabulary.com, one boy astutely noted, “It’s getting harder as I play!” 

That student was feeling the effects of adaptive word learning: the better you do, the harder the questions get – since the game is adapting to each and every student’s unique vocabulary level.

And, finally, we looked at the Vocabulary Lists page, where you can find word lists from every text from the Preamble to the Constitution to Rick Riordan’s novel "The Lightning Thief" . 

As a bonus, if the students of Van Meter Elementary School are having a hard time with finding the right words for their valentines, here is a timely list: “Love Letter Words for Valentine’s Day.”

To learn more about how Vocabulary.com works go to this page on the website.  It contains lots of details and easy to share instructions about the different parts and benefits of the site.

Our kids at Van Meter really loved seeing that they were 24th on the Vocabulary.com Leader Board during their time in the library.  They were going to keep on playing....and I had several of them tell me they couldn't wait to play at home too. 

Thank you Georgia and Vocabulary for bringing such a fantastic experience to our school community. We love what you are all doing with Vocabulary.com and can't wait to connect with you again.

Next up, teaching the teachers more about how they can integrate Vocabulary.com to enhance their curriculum and classroom or library too.  And spreading the word with parents too.

You can start playing and learning with Vocabulary.com too!