Want to help your older speech students understand vocabulary more in reading passages?

Carryover, vocabulary, curriculum…we need to keep all these things in mind when working with our older speech students.  We need our therapy sessions to be relevant so they see the purpose on why they are there.  We need to help them carryover the skills so they can use strategies when we are not around (which is the majority of the time).  We need them to be able to use our strategies in the classroom.  Many of our older speech students struggle with reading comprehension since it ties so closely with their poor language skills.  One area that impacts them is vocabulary.  There are some awesome free websites that can help you help them!  VocabGrabber is one such website!  Keep reading to see how you can use this awesome tool with your students.

What is VocabGrabber?

It is a website that allows you to copy and paste a text from another source and get the vocabulary words embedded in that text.  This can allow you to review words BEFORE reading.  Make sure they understand.  What words do they still struggle with?  How can you use context clues from the text to help them?

Where can you get reading passages?

I love getting free reading passages from Readworks.org or NewsELA.  Both sites you just need a free account.  For this example, I will show you NewsELA since they have such high interest articles on topics our older speech students will find interesting.  I also love that you can differentiate with reading levels.  You can give different students in the group different levels or different groups different levels.  It also comes with comprehension questions and other awesome features.   They are constantly adding new articles relevant to the times.

So what do you do?  Once you find the article you want to use, you can print it for your students.  But you can also copy and paste the text into VocabGrabber!  Find the article shown above by clicking HERE!

Then click…grab vocabulary!

You can pull all the relevant vocabulary that your students can work with.  The larger the text…the more times it comes up in the passage!  As you can also see, it provides you with categories.  You can use these categories to come up with sorting activities, find which category students struggle most with, and come up with follow up activities.  Want only tier 2 vocabulary words?  Click “vocabulary!”

What other features can you use?

I love that you can get definitions, parts of speech, and the examples from the text to use for context clues activities!  You can help students see the definitions for themselves.

I love that you can use this website to preview vocabulary BEFORE reading, review it after, and even help guide them during.  You can help determine what areas they really struggle most with.  You can even show them how to use this website themselves to preview vocabulary before reading and get definitions of difficult words.  How would you use this website to help your older speech students?!