When we first started teaching, word walls existed as simple strips of paper, each with the current unit’s vocabulary terms, tacked to a bulletin board and left there for the entire unit – like that unfinished project you started last month, right?!  Since those days, there’s been a lot of buzz around the phrase word wall and with good reason – word walls have proven to be essential to exposing students to academic vocabulary not only during, but also before and after instructional time.  Word walls have evolved – they have become visual, show word relationships, and are DIFFERENTIATED to meet the needs of diverse learners!

Make Your Vocab Your Classroom Wallpaper! Put up the entire year’s worth of words at the beginning of the school year.  It sounds overwhelming at first, but it’s a great way to show how words relate to each other throughout each unit and the year.  For example, in science, one of the characteristics of living things is to take in and use energy.  In this respect, an organism can be an autotroph or a heterotroph.  This concept is one that students learn at the beginning of the year in class, but it resurfaces again in cellular processes and again in classification and ecology.  To have that connection visible throughout the year shows students that they need to refer back to what they learned in the beginning and keeps those difficult to remember terms in the forefront of their memory.

Make your words come to life! They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  Make your word wall a VISUAL one!  Many concepts are difficult to comprehend, especially in science.   Adding a picture that describes the concept, plays on word associations, or actually shows the term’s meaning can really help those students that struggle with academic vocabulary and give them a better “picture” of what the word means.  Not to mention that providing a visual word wall is a way to differentiate for your students as well!

Accessible to all! Make your word wall accessible to all of your students.  While many of your students may find the word wall accessible as it is with both English terms and colorful pictures, there are still a handful that will stare at it blankly and not quite “get” the message you’re attempting to convey.  For those students, there are several things you can do.   Translate the words into a language they can comprehend and/or provide the root, suffix, and prefix meanings associated with each word on the word wall strip.  This will prove to be a big hit in your classes, especially because students really enjoy learning how to say scientific words (or any vocabulary terms for that matter) in another language.  For those students in the minority (say you have a student who is from Persia) in your class, you could also provide a sheet for their notebook that has all of this information translated in their specific language as well.   Obviously, you wouldn’t translate EVERY sheet for every lesson you give the student, but having those hard to learn words broken down and easily accessible makes life a little easier and class a lot less overwhelming.