Jekyll and Hyde Vocab Study

Today, students began the hour with a "pre-assessment" crossword that focused on the first 14 vocabulary words from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  After giving students a chance to figure out the words on their own, we then took a look at the complete list of words and tried to think our way through finding answers to the crossword.  Sometimes, it came down to counting letters.  :)  That's okay.  It is still thinking and using process of elimination which is a valuable skill for standardized tests and--dare I say it?--life.

The tricky part about learning vocab is that all students need to understand that language is complex. You can't always use synonyms interchangeably without having them sound ridiculous. For example, one of our words today is "countenance."  A synonym for that word is "face."  But I wouldn't say, "This morning I woke up and put some make up on my countenance."  Countenance is really more about expression and appearance, but the dictionary tells us that "face" is a legitimate synonym. That was the problem with the vocabulary narratives that students wrote for the Beowulf vocabulary.  Many times, the words sounded forced and the language inflated because of the student's attempt to swap one synonym for another.

 I have been reading a bit of research lately about vocabulary acquisition.  Researchers say that kids learn vocab best when they are forced to search for context clues that support the meaning of a word.  So, that is what we did today for the first 14.  I distributed some charts and we spent the rest of the hour, searching through the first section of Jekyll and Hyde for context clues and recording them in an attempt to fully understand the nuances of each word.  We ended the hour with an impromptu quiz--not for credit--to see if the researchers were correct.  First hour was kind of quiet today with only nine students in attendance, so the results are inconclusive.

It is going to be difficult to recreate this experience for folks who were absent today.  The first 14 vocabulary words are as follows: austere, sentiment, apocryphal, affirmative, eminently, countenance, reprove, sordid, singularly, catholicity, negligence, florid, ravage, coquetry.

Find the words in the section titled, "Story of the Door."  Determine the context clues that enable a reader to determine the meaning of the word.  For example, on page 3, Stevenson writes,

"Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance who was never lighted by a smile:"

Probably, if I did not know teh meaning of the word "countenance", I could figure out that it means "expression" because of the "never lighted by a smile" context clue.  So, those are the words that I would record. Students should have all 14 finished for tomorrow.  Additionally, prepare your research for our background discussion on Wednesday.