Flocabulary

 Blog 13 - Technology

As a teacher shared between two buildings, I wear many hats. One of my newest responsibilities this year has been helping with an eighth grade reading intervention time. The focus of the interventions was very undefined at first, and the input I got from colleagues was conflicting. The 8th grade literacy teachers wanted me to help students with the skills they were not performing well on during their classes. The district reading specialist wanted me to address the underlying reading skills that were deficient in these students, such as basic comprehension and vocabulary. 

When I examined the FAST test which students take three times each year, I could see that most of the questions students struggled on, at their roots, were due to a lack of vocabulary knowledge. Some of the concepts were so simple yet one little word they had not been exposed to caused them to choose an incorrect answer. To remedy this deficiency, I found a program called Flocabulary. This has been one of my favorite finds of this year! 

Flocabulary has units for K-12 based on many different content areas, but I just use the units on general vocabulary. Each unit begins with a musical composition, usually a rap, that incorporates all of the words. The songs are wacky and have crazy videos, so they really make an impression on the students. Because I have just used the free version of this product, I haven't tried all the online activities that students can do. I like to print out all the materials with a unit and go through them with my students, discussing, reviewing, and completing them together as a group. I have also created additional activities to go with each unit that will help my students to make connections between the words (even words from previous units), and to make the words more accessible and real to them. There is even an assessment that students can take at the end of each unit, and I really like how the questions are written because they require a higher-order type of thinking than just choosing a word to go in a sentence.

I am so excited for my students to complete their final FAST testing, because I believe I will see a change in their scores as a result of Flocabulary. I can already see increased confidence in these students and I hear them using these words in new ways, adding to their own daily vocabulary. (It will be worth requesting this program as a paid version from my district for next year!)