Wednesday Words: Year 5 vocabulary teaching activity

It's Wednesday so we're celebrating the wonder of words. Each week, we bring you a fun, flexible and creative vocabulary teaching activity that you can be easily implemented in the classroom. The activities are all taken from Rising Stars Vocabulary, a new programme that will build essential vocabulary skills for Reception to Year 6. Each teaching unit is based around a collection of linked focus words which your pupils will explore through meaningful activities.

This week, we're sharing a poetry-based resource in honour of National Poetry Day (4th October). The poem is The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson who died on the 6th October 1892.

Wednesday Words: 'How can vocabulary choices change and enhance meaning?'

This week's activity is for Year 5 (although it could be used with other year groups). It uses Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem The Eagle to explore how vocabulary choices change and enhance meaning.

This activity is taken from a wider teaching unit in which children will read the poem The Eagle and focus on words describing the eagle and its wild environment. They will consider different words to describe the colour blue. You can download the whole unit here. 


Meet the Words
 

• Write the word azure on your whiteboard. Say azure (azh-er). Ask the children to say azure.
•  Tell the children that the word azure describes a bright blue, like a cloudless sky.
• Ask: Have you ever seen anything that was azure? Take feedback.
• Ask the children to listen for the word as you read the poem.
• Check the children understand that this poem is about an eagle, high on a cliff edge, looking down at the sea.

Activity 1: Link to the poem 

Read the child-friendly definitions of the following words to the children.
clasps: grabs something tightly 
crooked: bent or twisted out of shape
wrinkled: lines or folds in something 
crawls: moves slowly – perhaps along the surface 

Now give the children a copy of the poem as you explain the words in the context.

clasps: This is how the eagle is holding on to the cliff edge; I don’t think he will fall.
crooked: This word describes the eagle’s hands. You can say ‘Eagles don’t have hands’ but I think we can let the poet get away with it! They are claws, and are rough and bent.
wrinkled: The sea is wrinkled; it is full of lines and folds in the waves.
crawls: This word describes how the sea is moving – slowly. 

Ask: What is the weather like in this poem?

This activity is taken from a wider teaching unit in which children will read the poem The Eagle and focus on words describing the eagle and its wild environment. They will consider different words to describe the colour blue. You can download the whole unit here.

Buy Rising Stars Vocabulary here.

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