Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Flocabulary - Catchy, Stick in Your Head Vocabulary Songs

I am not in any way affiliated with Flocabulary. 

Now that that is out of the way, have you heard of Flocabulary? No - well what are you waiting for? Yes - do you love it as much as I do?? It pretty much has a video for everything under the sun: vocabulary, math, science, social studies, language arts (grammar, literature, & more), life skills and current events.  All but math is for K-12, and a CCSS finder to see what videos align with what standard. It has lessons and resources for the teacher to use with the videos. The worst best part of the videos are the catchy songs. My students love them, get out of their seats and dance, love them! I get the songs stuck in my head, and walk around singing them ALL.DAY.LONG!

You can not access their videos unless you have a paid subscription, but I searched free videos  to see if there was one I could share. This particular video would probably be under the life skills section and is about a kid with cancer and how he's not letting it get him down. You can check it out here to see how appealing their videos are!

How do I use their videos do you ask? When I teach I love to show some kind of video/use technology to introduce what I am teaching. Who likes to listen to someone stand and talk at them all the time? So, if I can relate my teaching back to the video, even better! I take two weeks to teach a Flocab unit. 

For the first week, each day I pick 2 words to focus on. Before we watch the video, we write the words for the day in our Flocab Journal. That way my kiddos know which words to pay attention to while we watch the video. After the video we go back and fill in our journal. I start with taking "guesses" as to what they think the word means (even though it tells them in the video). After we get the definition down, we talk about what part of speech it would be (verb, adjective, noun), and write it in the box. Sometimes the words are multi-meaning words, and we talk about that as well, and write all the definitions in our journals. After we fill out the definition and part of speech boxes, I give them a few minutes to write a sentence using their new word, and then I pick 5 people to share with the class. Each day we review the "old" words before I give them the "new" ones. We watch the video every day, and it is fun to watch them read the lyrics on the screen as they try to sing along.




For the second week, we review our words, and then do the extension exercises that go along with the video that the website provides. Then we usually take the 10 question quiz the second Friday. 

The only complaint I have about the worksheets is that they are all ran together on multiple pages. So each unit I have to cut and tape them to different pieces of paper to get them in order and save paper! Maybe I should start saving them, so I don't have to do it all over again next year! #goals

As I was adding it to my TpT store, I thought you could use these with book studies too!

If you would like to get a copy of my Flocab Journal, you can click the picture above and it will take you to my TpT store, where you can grab it as a FREEBIE! 

I hope you enjoy the rest of your break!

~Kari