Vocabulary's CODE

Take a second and think about how you teach new vocabulary... This is what my reading supervisor asked the ELA teachers in grades 3-5 during a professional development day.  I learned several ways to teach new vocab throughout college courses and trainings in my district, but what my supervisor showed me next was very intriguing.

She introduced a book called The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core, which can be found here.
In this book, there are lots of strategies for teaching within the Common Core, but we focused on the second strategy, Vocabulary's CODE.

The short version: CODE is an acronym. C is for Connect, O is for Organize, D is for Deep-Processing, and E is for Exercising in review. We tried some awesome strategies for these different ways to practice and learn words. As teachers, we should try for each of these ways to work with words. You can have kids sort words based on your own criteria or criteria of their own. They can draw pictures to represent meanings of words or make connections between different words in the same or separate books/passages. I've only talked about a few, but there are endless possibilities.

If your state has aligned their standards to the Common Core, you already know that deeper thinking is a big focus! Vocabulary's CODE is awesome for deeper thinking with vocabulary words.

Happy teaching! :)