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vocabsushi: a cross-curricular bento box

July 4, 2009 Good news.  This morning I got an email from Jeff, the creator of VocabSushi.com.  The site is now completely free. 

What I love about this vocabulary learning tool is the context it creates for language.  It's a kinda cross-curricular bento box.  It's part vocab tool, part current events tools, part reading comprehension support tool.  And it's pretty.



Activities remember the user and grow progressively more challenging.  Sentence completions draw content directly from current linked news sources and allow students to visit the complete article for further context or simply, to learn more.  Students may also add articles to a personal online reading list. Other activities include definition matching, and reading articles with tagged vocabulary words and definitions.  Articles may be filtered for either national or regional news and come from such sources as: Wall Street Journal, Seattle Post Intelligencer, Motley Fool, Reuters, ESPN, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Huffington Post, CNN, Science Daily, and Politico.

Tools include printable pdf quizzes, podcasts, and downloadable mp3 files.

 

The site describes its purpose:

With VocabSushi, flash cards are a thing of the past. The best way to build your vocabulary is not rote memorization. It's seeing how words are used in everyday language. VocabSushi helps you prepare for the ISEE, SAT, ACT, GRE or other standardized test by teaching you vocab words with real-world, contextual examples found in the daily news. We're different than any other test preparation option, and here's how: Real sentences from the news teach context along with definitions. We scour the daily news from around the U.S. to find actual examples of your vocab words. Read selected sentences or whole articles to build a strong grasp of context.

Encourage your English, social studies, science, and ESL/ELL teachers, as well as your reading specialists and test prep coaches, to grab their chopsticks!  You might want to share with some kids too.

Still in beta, the site seeks suggestions for improvement.  Here are my few:

• How about including articles in English from international sources? 
• Could we filter articles by discipline?
• Would middle school folks (or teachers of students with reading challenges) be more interested if we were able to filter articles by level of difficulty?

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on July 4, 2009 | Comments (1)