List-Group-Label: Vocabulary Strategy

On Tuesday we had an awesome professional development seminar in our building that focused on vocabulary instruction. One strategy that I couldn’t wait to try with my second graders was List Group Label. A strategy from Reading Rockets, it’s a good way to get students brainstorming vocabulary words and then using higher-level thinking to group them together. It also teaches students how to organize, categorize and label information. The thing I (and my kiddos) liked most about this activity was that there really weren’t any wrong answers, they just had to defend why they grouped words together. We’ve been learning about planting and I used List-Group-Label to help us review for our planting test, discuss vocabulary and read and write these content words. This was an activity I did on a whim the morning after our workshop, so I didn’t have any beautiful graphic organizers or anchor charts ready.. but take a look. My plan is to make a generic graphic organizer that I can use whenever we want to use this activity!