In Praise of the Vocab Sort

As a science teacher, I realize that if students don't know all the fantastical Tier 3 vocabulary words associated with the cornucopia of topics in our state standards, they won't come close to real understanding of any of those topics.  So, I'm always on the lookout for effective vocabulary strategies to help students acquire vocabulary and make it their own.  Enter the Vocab Sort, which I first learned about at a workshop given by Larry Lewin: The power of the Vocab Sort is that it helps students start making sense of the jumble of science words that they have to know.  They have to put words in categories, which is what the brain loves in terms of remembering and recall.  That said, I don't do Vocab Sorts all the time.  Just like any strategy, students get burned out on them, and I find they are most helpful with topics where I know the words will confound and confuse my students the most--usually topics that are heavy in chemistry (photosynthesis, cell respiration, and molecular and Medelian genetics).
Here's how I usually use Vocab Sorts:

• I give an overall vocab sort (see the document above) at the start of the unit, before any instruction has started.  This overall sort has all of the critical vocabulary for the unit, including the words that they must know in order to demonstrate proficient understanding (my level 9 on my scoring scale) I tell students that it's alright that they don't know some of the words yet - that the point of this activity is so they can get to know the words so they can recognize them later!  Since most students have no background knowledge of any of the words, this is my way of getting them some background knowledge.  For students that have seen some of the words before, this is my way of activating that prior knowledge.
• I use the first overall sort as a pre-assessment.  If you scroll down in the document above, you'll see I want to know their top 5 words that they have no clue about.  This helps guide my instruction; I tally up the words and determine the 5 most common unknown words for each class.  I then make sure to give students more practice with those words during instruction.
• During instruction, I give "smaller" sorts on specific topics.  I basically split up the overall Vocab Sort I gave at the start of the unit into more specific ones, and use these after students have read about a topic.  For example, from the overall sort shown above, I created one just about photosynthesis that I gave to students after they read about that crazy plant process, which you can see below.  This helps students put the words into "smaller" categories in their brains and move from the general to the more specific.  When I handed this out, a lot of students remarked that this one was much easier, because they were already familiar with the words from the previous sort and from the reading.  (My response when students say that?  "Learning, ladies and gentlemen!  It's a wonderful thing!")
  

• Students connect the words they sorted in the more specific Vocab Sorts.  Understanding words in isolation is one thing; being able to connect concepts together to show real learning is another.  In the specific sorts, I make students write 1-2 sentences to connect the words to describe the category.  They must write it in a way that they show what the words mean and how they are connected.  I find that these are fantastic assessments of learning because student writing always reveals whether or not students really understand or not.
  
• Students use all of the words and concepts to answer the essential question.  After writing their connecting sentences for each subtopic, they need to put these together into a coherent paragraph that answers the essential question.  Students can't just copy their original sentences; they must now look at those sentences and decide how they can fit them together in order to answer the big question posed.  
  

Again, I don't do Vocab Sorts all of the time, but I feel that you get the biggest learning bang for your buck when you use them in units that are heavy with Tier 3 vocabulary of which students have little prior knowledge.  If you'd like copies of the vocab sorts above as well as one for cell respiration, you can click the links below.
Overall Cell Energy Vocab Sort
Photosynthesis Vocab Sort
Cell Respiration Vocab Sort
Click here for more vocabulary strategy ideas.