As I continue to work with and get to know the students in our class, I am noticing what skills they possess and where extra attention needs to be placed. Due to many of the students' difficulty with oral communication (many students struggle to "find" words when speaking) and in some cases writing (there is too much emphasis on slang terms and expressions) I have initiated a new idea in my attempt to build each student's vocabulary.
Beginning on October 1 and continuing until further notice, each student will be assigned a "Word of the Day" assignment. When it is your child's turn, they need to research one new sophisticated word, be prepared to pronounce it correctly for our class, spell it correctly on a card for our word wall, give the part of speech (n, v, adj, adv, etc.), give the inflected forms if there are any, and use it in an excellent sentence. Words that already hang on our word wall are not to be repeated. Check the class calendar on this site for your child's assigned day.
Where can they find words? That is easy. They could come from their nightly reading. The newspaper can be a source of new vocabulary. It could be a random search through a dictionary, and/or they could look up a familiar word in the thesaurus and discover a sophisticated synonym or antonym. Example: if you look up "sad" in the thesaurus, one word you would find is "melancholy". Please note that since we are working to build vocabularies, I will be encouraging the students to use these new words, so please make sure that they are not obscure medical terms, etc. They must be useful since the students will be encouraged to use them throughout the day, at least. 
What do I mean by slang? Here are a few examples we have come across so far:
-saying that things are "cool" when we are not referring to temperature
-overusing the word "like" (see a previous blog for more details)
-"freaked out"
-"you rule"
-"stuff"
-"sup"
