
This is seriously one of my favorite vocabulary activities. The discussions that my students and I have had about words while doing this activity have been so powerful.

Choose Two Antonyms
To begin, choose two antonyms. For this particular activity, our vocabulary word was serious. In advance, I wrote silly and serious on two Post-It Notes and placed them at each end of the graphic organizer.

Brainstorm Synoynms
While you *could* do this in advance, I really prefer to do it WITH my students. I like to use their words or teach them how to find good synonyms and antonyms by using thesaurus.com.
As they name words, I jot them down on Post-Its. You can choose to add as few or as many words as you feel your students can handle.

Rank Them
Here is where the magic happens! We rank the words based on what we think is on each end of the spectrum.
For example, notice that the words we started with at the top and the bottom (silly and serious) have been moved. There are more “extreme” words that could be better used, depending on the context.
With this set of words, my students noted that we might be silly in class. But we are not childish or inappropriate. They gave examples of things someone might do to be childish or mature. They mentioned teachers who were more serious and teachers who acted more silly.
These discussions, uses, and exposure to words in the classroom are critical to explicit vocabulary instruction.

Vocabulary Notebook or Calendar Time
In my classroom, we write a lot of this in our vocabulary notebook after our discussion. I don’t require the students to copy what I have in my notebook. Within reason, students are able to put these words into the order that they choose.
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