A quick vocabulary lesson

Planning to look at vocabulary in a reading session should not be a laborious task.  A quick annotation of the text should allow you to choose the key vocabulary that you would like to look at and discuss with the students. 

This week I looked at Survivors by David Long with a group of Y6 children.  I decided to focus on vocabulary with the children in this short 15-20 minute reading session.  The class theme at the moment is Mountains so I chose the text to tie in with this. 

Click the image for further information about this book. 

As a hook into the lesson we watched this 'Top 5 avalanches' video on YouTube.

​We read together the opening of the Colby Coombs story and in the first two paragraphs I picked out the words highlighted below in red and asked children if they knew what they meant?  For some, children gave excellent definitions, others were educated guesses from context and some had to be explained to them.  We recorded them on the board and revisited them at the end of the lesson.
 
“America’s highest mountains, which span more than 400 miles”
 
“An experienced mountaineer and wilderness guide”
 
“blinded by a condition known as a whiteout”
 
“down a sheer​ rock face of the great mountain.”
 

I asked – was this avalanche expected?  They answered no.
 
I asked them to highlight or underline three phrases which show that the events happened quickly or rapidly. ​

They underlined: ‘Within seconds,’ ‘With no time,’ ‘sudden’ and we discussed how using all three of these in quick succession intensified the feeling of speed.  
 
We read the next section and I instructed the students to find any evidence that the avalanche was very powerful. 

​We then collected synonyms that the children knew could be used to describe the powerful avalanche.
 
e.g.
ferocious
strong
fearsome
vicious
savage
awesome
 
We then discussed which other natural phenomena could be described using these words.
The savage ocean, a ferocious earthquake, an awesome eruption (of a volcano)