Walk This Way!

Teachers, looking to get students out of their seats and learning some new words? Try introducing pantomime as a vocabulary-enriching activity. As Beck, McKeown and Kucan point out in Creating Robust Vocabulary, "physically responding to words can promote connections to new word meanings."

Obviously, this type of activity lends itself to teaching verbs. For example, if you display the Visual Thesaurus word map for walk and click on the meaning "use one's feet to advance; advance by steps," students will be introduced to a whole host of words for different ways of walking that they can learn and act out.  

Once you display this list of "walks" to your class, you could have students play a charades-like game where each student chooses a different walk to demonstrate, and then the class must try to correctly identify whether the student is slinking, strutting, shuffling or hobbling (just to name a few!).