I have been looking for a way to enhance the vocabulary of my fifth graders and now I have am about to implement the best way to do so! I ran across Vocabsushi and immediately knew that I had found what I have been looking for. It offers each student an individualized program that will adapt to their specific needs. After a pre-assessment, each student will be assigned to his own vocabulary level and will be exposed to an unlimited number of words to practice as they read the words in the context of newspapers from around the country.
The features in Vocabsushi include sentence completions, definition matching, and each word contains the part of speech, definition, and an MP3 recording of the pronunciation. Each student can monitor his own progress of how many words are being learned over a period of time, as well as which words need more practice.
I really love the feature of being able to select current articles from various newspapers from New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Boston Globe, and many others, as they bring global awareness to the classroom and broaden perspectives.
Assessment is available by creating practice quizzes, teacher-assigned quizzes, as well as taking exams to determine which words have been mastered to eliminate from your vocabulary list.
In the past, I have assigned 10 words every other week through Vocabulary for Achievement (when they aren't doing spelling) where they apply them in different ways through analogies, synonyms, antonyms, and in context. That means that they only learn 150 new vocabulary words a year vs. hundreds through Vocabsushi. I am so excited about all that this adaptive learning program has to offer and I can't wait to see the progress that my students make.
Below is a vimeo that offers a brief introduction to Vocabsushi.
Rapid (muted) Demo of VocabSushi, iPhone app, and VocabBomb from Vocab Sushi on Vimeo.
