Using Visuwords in the Classroom

Visuwords can be used in various ways in the classroom.  The initial ways I thought about using it in my room fit into my Language Arts class.   First, I would use Visuwords to have conversations about multiple-meaning words.  This is a concept my students need more practice with.  When students are reading they need to discern which definition the word is using in the sentence, a skill that stems from and adds to good reading comprehension.  Some students, though, do not pay attention to distinctions, and end up with incorrect meaning.  Here is an example I made:

A second way that came to mind is to remind students that “good” and “scared” are not the only adjectives they can use in their writing, for example.  Visuwords is good for expanding students’ writing vocabulary and synonyms.  Here is an example I made:

Other ways Visuwords can help in the classroom is exploring new vocabulary in any content area, and investigating the links between words.  In this blog, I loved reading his ideas, especially under the subheading , “Discover more information than you expect to.”  He writes that looking up “banana” could lead to a student discovering many edible fruits they never heard of before.  

This website includes a video describing how to use Visuwords, and the site also gives more examples of how it can be used in the classroom.

Here is another source related to math.