Workshop+Digital+Dictionaries

=Common Core= toc

Use glossaries and beginning dictionaries, both print and digital, to determine or clarify the meaning of words and phrases. Consult reference materials (e.g., dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses), both print and digital, to find the pronunciation and determine or clarify the precise meaning of key words and phrases.

=Purpose=

To share resources that teachers can use with their students in the process of helping them to develop vocabulary and its correct usage.

=Scaffolds= Look here (Getting Started) for strategies that will help you to try out new technology and programs.

=Portfolio= Choose a few words (5-7) to investigate briefly and then from these words choose the most interesting to explore more indepth. Create some kind of artifact that represents your journey into the story of the word you chose, whether it is visual arts, music, writing, etc.

=Why Word Study= Indepth word study increases vocabulary, reading comprehension, the ability to figure out new words from context, accuracy in writing, and the ability to spell. While it may seem to be a waste of precious teaching time to do indepth word study, in the long range it saves time. For every word, there is a word family--words related to it in a variety of ways, including synonyms, antonyms, rhymes, etymology, and so forth. For every word there is also a story, in terms of where it came from and when it was incorporated into English. It is much easier to remember and use correctly vocabulary learned through studying the stories of words and their families than simply to memorize a group of words.

Fortunately, no one needs a degree in linguistics to be able to share this knowledge with students, since the internet has so many wonderful, free reference sources on just about every aspect of a word. This workshop gives you a range of possible dictionaries your students can use.

=Types of Dictionaries= Don't just cut to the chase and simply look at the traditional style dictionaries (which are on here). Look at your group of words in relationship to all word characteristics--meaning, connotation, history (etymology), and sound features (rhyme, syllables, etc.). It is difficult for students to use words correctly or to use the words they find in a thesaurus correctly if they don't have a concept of how language works across its history and within its system. Chasing a word or two through these dictionaries, including the foreign language ones, creates the foundation for rich teaching of memorable vocabulary.

=Examples of Dictionaries=  This page includes a number of different resources in/about English as well as dictionaries of common non-English languages such as American Sign Language, Somoli, and Spanish. Remember that on the internet are dictionaries of probably every written language, so you can use these when you get students who are not native speakers of English.



English dictionary
(also includes a lot of different language dictionaries): []



Etymological dictionary of English:
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Rhyming dictionary:
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Thesaurus
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Visual English Dictionary
(a good resource for kids who are learning English) []



American Sign Language Dictionary
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Somoli/English/Italian Dictionary
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Somoli/English
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Spanish/English
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