Heads Up

When students work on an assignment, there is a purpose. We want students to practice the skills, and we look at the success (or struggle) of students to determine what we need to reteach or who we need to target for individual successes.

On our Vocabulary Word Map


Students were struggling with synonyms. If the word they were mapping was "luckier", students were writing "other related words": luck, lucky, luckiest for synonyms.

A synonym is a word that means the same, but is different. For "luckier", the words, fortunate, advantageous, blessed, charmed, favored, promising, successful would all be considered synonyms.

There were many fourth grade students who were struggling. Ms. Leom's idea was one that all students would enjoy, even the students who understood synonyms, so she did the activity with the entire class.

There is an app, a game, called Heads Up. You hold a phone or iPad to your head and the app shows a word. The audience needs to give the player clues to guess the word, but they can't use the word or word parts itself. We played from the animal "card deck".



We only had five minutes to play the game, but it was enough time to make the point and develop the idea of synonyms being DIFFERENT words than the word itself or word parts.