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TITLE:  Einstein Club

AUTHOR:  Liz Cannon, McGill Elem., NV

GRADE LEVEL/SUBJECT:  6, vocabulary

OVERVIEW:  I started this activity to get my students more
excited about vocabulary.

PURPOSE:  This is an ongoing lesson to get students to learn
the vocabulary that corresponds with core curriculum.

OBJECTIVES:  Students will learn vocabulary lists from
science and social studies lessons.

RESOURCES/MATERIALS:  Vocabulary lists from texts

ACTIVITIES AND PROCEDURES:  Each morning when the students
first get to class, a list of ten vocabulary words is on the
board.  I usually use five social studies words and five
science words.  Students write sentences showing correct
usage of each word for one point per word and define the
words for tow points per word.  There are thirty possible
points.  Each day I tally the points each day and keep a
cumulative score for the month.  The top five students are
posted each day.  The top five for the month are in
Einstein Club and win a prize (pencil, candy bar, etc.) and
a picture of Einstein.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER:  Words get taken off the Einstein
list if the majority of the class gets the definition for
the day.  Otherwise, words stay on until enough students can
define them.  This provides a type of pretesting.  At the
end of the week all of the words show up on a vocabulary
quiz.  This is the only portion of the activity that is
graded; the daily vocabulary is not.

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