The following blog post was written by Lori G. Wilfong.To read more newsworthy blog posts from Eye On Education, subscribe to our Insights eNewsletters.

As districts continue to work to meet the needs of the Common Core, the issue of sharing the workload across content areas has been broached. "We can't do it all!" Language arts teachers feel overwhelmed as they work to create new courses that integrate nonfiction, fiction, writing, and vocabulary seamlessly into units of rigor for their students. They then turn their heads to their colleagues: "Can you help?

So where to start? Vocabulary is an area that every single content area teacher must teach. Whether we teach music, art, physical education, or a core subject, the academic language of the discipline must be taught in such a way that students learn and apply new words that help them begin to write and speak like scholars.

The strategies presented in this paper are "nook and cranny" strategies. Understanding the unwieldy curriculum that teachers masterfully map out to teach, I became a collector of strategies that take five minutes or less to implement into the classroom. When we have a few minutes left at the end of class where we often let students begin homework or chat—why not turn these moments into word play?

 

To read more about the four, five-minute vocabulary strategies, download
"Five-Minute Voabulary Strategies for the Common Core."