Teaching Vocabulary: The Best Practices

Today was a great Monday in my classroom!  We start class with 20 minutes of independent reading, and so far, that is going great.  I set the standards high and I hope that will holdout throughout the school year.  After the 20 minutes of reading, we record our reading on the Status of the Class form that I found in the book called The Book Whisperer.  Next, we go over the mentor sentence of the week and notice the qualities that make it our mentor sentence.  Finally, we do the vocabulary portion of the class.  So, I decided that, on Mondays, I will give the students all of the vocabulary words and that will take the place of the "lesson" for that day.  Today, that worked perfectly.
So, we all get out our little dictionaries that we made.  This is a folder with prongs in the middle and pockets. We put paper in the middle and, on each page, we wrote a letter of the alphabet to create a dictionary for each student.  Today, we had 5 words for the week for the 7th grade and 6 words for the 8th grade students.  These words come from the story that we will be reading this week.  I give the students the word, part of speech, correct definition that goes with our text, and a good example sentence.  Many teachers think that the students should look up the words on their own, but I prefer to give this to the students so that I know they have the correct definition and sentence.  They write all of this in their dictionary under that word's entry.  Then, I follow a little "script" that I found online that worked wonderfully!
Here is how the script went:
1. The word is ______.  What is the word? (I make the students say the word aloud to ensure they can say it properly.)
2. The defintion of _________ is __________________. (Again, they read it aloud. I make them redo it until they are all saying it.)
3. Let's look at our sentence. (I read the sentence again.)
4. Talk at your tables and figure out another way we could say this word in the sentence. (I make sure to tell students that this word does not have to be a synonym of the word.  This is to make sure that students have an idea of what the word means and can replace it to make the same sentence make sense.)
5. Then, we share what they talked about at theit tables.
6. At the end, I try to think of a higher order question that goes with the word. So, if the word was faulty, I might ask: what are other things that can be faulty? This really makes them (and me) think about the word.

So, we did this with all 5 of the 7th grade words and then all 6 of the 8th grade words.  It took some time, but I feel that the time was well-spent and I hope to see great improvements on their vocabulary development from these vocabulary practices.
Tomorrow, we will begin doing some paper-and-pencil activites that are Marzano-approved.
I will be sharing these soon!