Flocking to Fifth: Vocabulary, my slight Marzano obsession & FREEBIES

Hope everyone is enjoying the beginning of the school year/end of the summer. I think I'm done in my room until Monday, when we have our "Meet the Teacher Night". I have some finishing touches to add, but I'm going to do that during our 1/2 day work day before parents show up :) I'll have to take some pictures then. Today I'm off to my husband's classroom. I asked him if they were allowed to use their laminator whenever (some people have to turn things in to get laminated?) and he said "Yeah... well, at least I think so, I've never used it". I, of course, nearly choked on my dinner. The difference between men and women right? :)

Anyways, I had a bit of an awkward moment the other day at school when my principal asked me if I had read the Marzano book I borrowed ("Building Academic Vocabulary"). Of course it was still in my car. After weaseling my way out of that situation, I figured I had better get on that.

I've done some reading the last few days, and there's some great stuff in there!

And what kind of blogger friend would I be if I didn't share my discoveries? So, here are my freebies you can download from TN :)

I'm using this to go inside my students notebooks to help them assign a number to their understanding. You can also make this poster sized on blockposters.com. I usually choose for my "posters" to be 4 sheets of paper, because if you make things much larger they tend to become pixelated.

This is a screen shot, so it looks a little off center. The actual PDF looks great and contains two "terms" per page. You could use it as a template to have your kids freely write it in their notebooks or you can actually print them out and have your students keep them inside of pronged folders. In his book, Marzano suggests keeping all subject areas of
vocabulary words in one notebook.

I thought I should go ahead and share my photo with Marzano. My co-worker and I asked him for a photo after we head him speak at the ASCD conference in St. Louis this summer. It started out as a joke, because our school is ALWAYS talking about him and his books, but I can't even lie, I thought it was a little fun :)