Vocabulary Sorting and Matching - Google Slides Manipulatives

A few weeks ago was the Teacher's Discovery/Voces Digital Spring into Reading Virtual Conference (click here for recordings from the conference). I always make an attempt to attend a few of the online sessions, because there is a such a great slate of presenters from whom I learn so much. The sessions which I attended a few weeks ago definitely did not disappoint. 

Margarita Perez Garcia has been a presenter for the past three years, and she has recently played a tremendous role in my growth as a CI/ADI teacher, especially in the area of the importance of level-appropriate, comprehensible readings for students (see my post on my own experiment with reading her novellas as a novice-low, Spanish reader). I know that I will always walk away from her sessions with some great ideas and a deeper understanding of CI/ADI instruction. This year, Margarita presented on word clouds and how to use them to develop pre-reading comprehension in students. I had never thought about using word clouds in this way! Below is the recording of her presentation:

This week, I had to be out of the classroom for a day of department head staff development, so I took an idea from Margarita's presentation about vocabulary groupings/associations (see 28:17 in the video). Essentially, the idea is for students to categorize vocabulary words by commonalities/associations. She states, "Classifying words into meaningful groups helps students to remember them." Margarita was demonstrating this with a word cloud for pre-reading comprehension, but since I was going to be out and needed a substitute lesson plan to post on Google Classroom, I created a Google Slide manipulative where students dragged already-known vocabulary word to their proper categories.

Here are some of my Latin 1 slides which I created (there were four slides total):

Observations

1. I really liked the higher-order thinking involved with this. Students had to think about not only the meaning but also to which category it best fit. This was for Latin 1, so the categories were rather basic.
2. I turned this into a Google Slides manipulative using already-known vocabulary solely because it was a sub lesson plan activity. However, I would like to use this using a word cloud like Margarita does as a pre-reading activity for new words and have students write their answers in the columns. Writing in the target language, even if it is just words, causes the brain to add to/refine its mental representation of the language. Because it would be used for pre-reading, students would then enter into the actual reading with a deeper knowledge of these words.
3. Notice that none of the categories were "grammar-related," e.g., adjectives, adverbs, 1st conjugation verbs, 3rd declension adjectives, etc. Instead, the focus was on meaning. The closest I got to naming a grammar category was "words where the subject is I," "adjectives related to size," "words a Roman would shout" (instead of using the word "interjections"), and "words which can complete this sentence."
4. Students told me that it was "fun," because it was a different kind of activity and did require some thought. 
5. Definitely telling students explicitly how many words were in each category helped! There was no ambiguity with words maybe being in more than one category or any words not used.
6. I think that grouping these words into specific categories did mentally help organize the vocabulary for students, i.e., in that although they have acquired a lot of vocabulary so far, there is a degree of logic when they are organized into common associations/groups.

As always, thanks to Margarita for this idea! I hope you will try it out using the word cloud as a pre-reading activity - let me know how it goes!