One of my favorite activities to do with my Sophomores is called Vocabulary Challenge.  The have to choose from 50-75 vocabulary words and create a story that makes sense and shows that know the meaning of the word and can use it appropriately. 


So for instance: 

     This will not receive credit:  The girl show a great deal of apathy.

     This will: By constantly rolling her eyes and sighing loudly, the girl   
     clearly expressed apathy at her mom’s lecture. 

We do this challenge once a marking and students can earn Extra Credit for using more words (and we all know how much they love Extra Credit).  I tell the students to feel free to use sports, cartoon characters, movie figures, etc. to make their story interesting.  Because of media and it being an election year, several students have even tackled satirizing politicians for their stories!

The creativity and the humor in some of these stories is the best part of it for me when I am grading them.  However, they are also upping their vocabulary game manipulating such words as charlatan, pernicious, pusillanimous, adulation, sycophant, grandiloquent, harangue, galvanize, juggernaut, just to name a few, into their stories.  (You can now also see how they can have fun in the political spectrum with these words!)  I have to place a 1 page maximum on the story or some of them would write 2-3 pages. 

Vocabulary instruction and assessment is predominantly memorization, even when we know that our goal is building.  And, we know the students making flashcards and quizlets…we tell them to!  This activity takes the assessment a step beyond memorization and it is one of the activities my students anticipate and really enjoy doing.  After I read them all, I compile a list of all of their story topics and then read 2-3 really creative or funny ones to the class. 

Here is a list of some of the story topics that they have fun writing:

o   the 1985 Celtics vs. the current Golden State Warriors

o   a noxious gas actually coming from a culinary school improperly disposing of eggs

o   a farmer trying to win the annual pumpkin competition

o   a charlatan trying to pull off a hoax on a genial couple

o   a restaurant date ending in an altercation

o   a boy who loves the WWE, but his mom thinks it is a fallacy

o   a myriad of people trying to get the new iphone

o   a letter to 007 about planting a bomb in a clandestine location

o   a yachting trip the faces a formidable storm

As you can see, they are very creative with their topics!