We know that AI can save a lot of time for teachers when used effectively and responsibly, but there are so many possibilities to actually rebuild our education. It presents sex. Researcher Elfrieda PhD “Freddie” Hebert has been using digital tools to inform us of thinking about vocabulary teaching for decades. Today, the job involves thinking about the potential role of AI. She presented a free webinar, New Science in Vocabulary: An AI-enhanced Approach to Word Selection, sharing some of her latest thinking. We are so excited that we had to share these three powerful ways of using AI for vocabulary instruction that teachers can try out right away.
1. Use AI to help you choose the words to teach
Dr. Hiebert’s research suggests that teachers should choose the vocabulary to teach by relying on data on how often they appear in school textbooks. For years, she has added to her own growing database of word incidence frequency and has established a “core vocabulary” that prioritizes students. Now she suggests asking AI to cast a spell to quickly and easily identify the best active language vocabulary for children in the text.
(If you’re not yet fully familiar with creating your own AI prompts, head to the 300 best AI prompts for K-12 teachers for inspiration and guidance. To find what the teacher likes See this list of 33 AI tools.)
How to Ask AI to Help Choose a Vocabulary
Dr. Freddy Hiebert via TextProject
In both her webinar and her follow-up video, “Teaching Word Networks Using AI,” Dr. Hebert narrows down the highest-value words for third graders from a list of possibilities from picture books. We reviewed how to ask AI. Candles by Lucia Gonzalez. She began by sharing the above context and added: Beyond? “She then provided a list of potential words for the book.
Claude quickly provided the insight that the words preparation, presentation, events, blessings and donations serve as challenging and academically valuable “high-value” words for third-graders in other contexts.
AI can also help you choose vocabulary to highlight to build student background knowledge on a particular topic. To the prompt above, Dr. Hebert added: “I would also like to help students with background knowledge about things that are part of the performance, such as theater and cultural events.” She quickly regained the curation list for the topic, with characters, costumes, applause, decorations, fiestas and famous events to regain the curation list for the topic.
Dr. Hebert supports approaching vocabulary learning with the aim of helping students build a “collection” of words they know. This approach helps children to deepen and retain their understanding of the meaning of words. AI can quickly help teachers create a list of connected words and create visuals about word relationships.
Organize words by concept
Dr. Freddy Hiebert via TextProject
In a blog post, Dr. Hebert showed how AI can quickly group words from a list into meaning-based categories. These have been found to be “candle action,” “celebration preparation,” and “celebration features.” In her “Using AI to Teach Word Networks” video, Hiebert shows how to use AI to create visuals and conceptually organize a set of words from a storyteller’s candle. These concept categories were preparation, light effects, and responses associated with the Fiesta. As a teacher, it is easy to imagine as a teacher how any of these categories can help students to “collect” relationships between words more in order to improve their vocabulary knowledge.
Shows multiple meanings of a word
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AI can also help you create visuals to explore multiple meanings of words. Inspired by Dr. Hebert’s prompt, Claude requested: “I’m a third grade teacher. Create a graphic organizer that explains the multiple meanings of the words concluded. Make them colorful.” Claude was delivered on the easy-to-use Word Web.
Shows the morphological relationships of words
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Target Vocabulary – Seeing words that are morphologically related to words that share meaningful parts of words will help children to better understand and add new words to their knowledge base. Dr. Hebert encourages teachers to use AI to easily generate lists and create visuals of morphologically relevant words. “Conclusion” was one of the high value words her AI identified from the storyteller’s candle. He urged Claude to: “I’m a third grade teacher. Make a web graphic organizer that shows all the morphological relatives of the word “conclusion.” Again, we got ready-made slides to discuss with our kids without racking our own brains!
Explore similar meaningful words
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You can also use AI to direct your vocabulary to words with related meanings or words within the same “semantic family.” Again, taking clues from Dr. Hebert’s prompt, we asked Claude: “I’m a third grade teacher. Create a graphic organizer that introduces children to the same semantic family words as “conclusion.” Make it colorful. “The initial results I got included words that I found were too easy, so I’ll add four words that I’ll keep this graphic, but that could be a bit challenging for my third-grade reader. Choose the words they are likely to see in future reading and academic tasks.’ Results? Quick and easy visual to reinforce the meaning of “conclusion” and introduce more subtle related words to children.
3. Create your own “AI Assist” text and worksheets
Much of Dr. Hebert’s work relies on the idea that the more children encounter vocabulary, the more they can build knowledge of the words and autonomy they read. Creating additional text for kids with target words and designing activities is a great way to increase exposure to those words. However, when the mind becomes blank when trying this kind of thing, the AI once again has its back. In her webinar, Dr. Hebert shared many ideas for using AI in vocabulary-driven student texts and worksheets. Here are some prompts we used, inspired by her instructions and our results:
New text containing the target word
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We asked Claude. Include the terms event, preparation, deadline, and presentation (and its morphological relatives). Repeat each word at least twice if possible. “The results were… quite good! Additional prompts allow you to easily adjust length, difficulty and topics. (Bonus tip: Be sure to check Dr. Hiebert’s website TextProject to find ready-made student texts organized by topic, including repeated exposure to words in high-value vocabulary.)
Blank worksheet
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There are many possibilities to use AI to create worksheets to enhance vocabulary learning. I asked Claude: “Create a worksheet for third grade students. Include a word bank with vocabulary words at the bottom.” Again, the results are a great starting point, with additional feedback or offline You can adjust it by editing.
A sentence for drawing or acting
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We often ask children to write in vocabulary language, but reading and reflecting the meaning of additional sentences is another valuable exercise. And you guessed it, AI can do a lot of prep work for you. “Create a list of sentences with the words “Claude, events, preparations, deadlines and easy to act or explain,” he asked. The results definitely got us on the right track.
As with AI, teacher eyes are essential for reviews. But having to perform thoughtful editing is much faster and easier than starting from scratch.
