McGuffey's Tip of the Week-Dictionary Usage and Games-October 19, 2015 Hannah Jeong

McGuffey's Tip of the Week-October 19, 2015

Dictionary Usage and Games

Be sure you teach your child alphabetical order.... it really isn't out of date... yet. Alphabetizing is a way of showing students how things, like words, can be organized. As students create more and more products that are digital, they won't end up in a dusty basement. Instead, their product may be cached and live online indefinitely. Being able to tag their content for easy retrieval, organize their bookmarks, documents, apps, ebooks, music, videos pictures, etc. on smart devices will be very important; learning at an early age about different ways to organize and sort is essential.

Here are a couple of games to make learning more fun:

Dictionary Treasure Hunt:

"After my eight-year-old lost a tooth, I hid a dollar and prepared a treasure hunt for him in his dictionary. I told him to start with the word "the." In his dictionary, next to "the" I pencilled in "tooth." When he found "tooth" he saw the word "fairy" and so on until he had put them all together to discover, "The tooth fairy came. Look under our DVD player." Creative games like this keep dictionary drills from feeling like, well, like dictionary drills."
This is a dictionary speed drill for more than one student. Ahead of time, prepare a list of words and the dictionary page numbers on which they are found. Divide the students into teams and give each team the list of words (without the page numbers) and dictionaries for each team member. Teams race to find the words in the dictionary and write the page numbers next to the word. The first team to find all of the page numbers wins.
Another way to play this game is to number the members on each team and give one dictionary to each team. Don't give out the list ahead of time. Just call out a number and a word. The team members with that number race to find the word and shout out the page number. Choose ahead of time whether to allow students to help their team mates or just cheer them on.

Patricia Halliday
http://www.mcguffeysonlinetutor.com/
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Dictionary Race:

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