Content Vocabulary Strategy: Word Drawings

Hi Texas Teachers!  It's Ari from The Science Penguin.

I want to share a strategy for content vocabulary.  Someone asked me this summer if there was any better way to help students with vocabulary other than writing a definition and drawing a picture.  This occurred to me the other day while I was listening to a presentation.  I've seen word drawings for math, but not for science, so I decided to try it out.

 

It takes creativity and a true understanding of the word in order to create a word drawing.  Students use a variety of skills in creating a word drawing.  I made some examples in the image below.

Word drawings are something new I am trying this school year.  I will definitely model the technique and have students work whole class and in small groups before making it individual.  I think GT kiddos will enjoy this.  It seems like a great idea for interactive notebooks, science stations, and pairs work.

My students keep a vocab folder of the MOST important terms for 5th grade science and word drawings are a great option to incorporate.

Animal Adaptations Bulletin Boards

Hey!  It's Ari, The Science Penguin.  This is the first of MANY special posts from Texas teachers about the exciting things we are doing in our classrooms.

My awesome team and I have been working on animal adaptations in science.  Each of our classes chose a different ecosystem: rain forest, ocean, tundra, swamp, and desert.  Then, we learned about our ecosystems more in depth and made animals, then labeled their structural adaptations and wrote about their behavioral adaptations.

Some of us used different colors of paper cut up and others used watercolors.  I really like the way the watercolor animals turned out!

Today we were reviewing behavioral and structural adaptations before doing a lab on bird beaks and the students were able to apply their knowledge to other situations really easily, even though we had only focused on rainforest adaptations!

Here are our bulletin boards from our work last week!

Rain Forest

 Tundra

 Desert

Swamp

 Ocean

TEKS: 4.10A explore how adaptations enable organisms to survive in their environment such as comparing birds' beaks and leaves on plants

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