How Movement and Repetition Help Vocabulary Stick

At Clinton Valley Elementary School in Michigan, fifth-grade teacher Samantha DiCicco helps students in her small fluency group build vocabulary through a short multisensory routine that incorporates movement, rhythm, and repetition. At the end of every day, students spend a few minutes practicing four or five words from their core curriculum, doing call-and-response chants with the words and their definitions, along with hand motions. By introducing the vocabulary before they encounter it in their reading, DiCicco gives students a chance to become familiar with the words and their meanings ahead of time.

The routine is high-energy, and it always starts with movement. Students stand up, DiCicco calls out the word, and they repeat it. Then they stomp or clap to show how many syllables they hear. Next, DiCicco reads the definition, and students repeat it back. The last step is to add a gesture that represents the word.

It may look simple, but using multiple senses gives students more than one way to connect with and remember a new word. “The more senses that we use, the more it allows our brain to use different parts for that vocabulary and the definition to cement,” DiCicco says. The physical movements also give students another cue they can use to recall the word later. The amount of repetition is extensive, but it’s very intentional, since hearing and saying each word repeatedly—and connecting movement and meaning to it again and again—creates more opportunities for the vocabulary to stick for students. And, when those words show up in a text, they don’t have to work so hard to figure them out. Instead, they can focus their attention on understanding what they're reading.

For DiCicco, the routine is also about making learning fun. “It really engages the students. It makes [the classroom] a place where they want to be. It makes it a place where they want to learn,” she says. “That’s my favorite part about the vocab routine.”

To find more strategies for using movement in reading instruction, read Elise Tureau’s article for Edutopia, “Using Movement as an Instructional Tool in Literacy.”