Multiple meaning words are so fun to teach. I absolutely LOVE the new series of hilarious Geico commercials for this purpose! I also found a fun M&M commercial too! It is a great vocabulary lesson and a fun activity to do with your students when you start teaching this concept. Students LOVE watching YouTube!!
Why teach multiple meaning words? Teaching multiple meaning words will help deepen language and reading comprehension and expand vocabulary use in writing. This connects directly to the curriculum and will help your student be successful in their classrooms.
3 Easy Steps to an ENGAGING vocabulary lesson using TV commercials:
1. First discuss each word from the videos [aunt, clog, fencing, fan, buck] and assess what your students already know about each word.
2. Watch each video
3. Fill in a section on the worksheet after you watch each one. There are five videos on this post so you will need two worksheets if you want to do them all (there are 3 spots for three on the page).
4. Use the other FREEBIE I link to at the bottom of this page to help your students visualize the two meanings of the words.
It is also a great activity for inferencing and problem-solving. You can ask your students questions like "How would you solve the problem in the video". "What do you think might happen next?" "Why is that situation bad or annoying?"
Scroll down to the bottom of this post to download the FREE worksheet to use along with these videos and other multiple meaning words activities. It includes a BONUS MMW word list too!
Aunt Infestation- This one is great because you can discuss the homophone word "aunt/ant" and also the word infestation, which is likely to be a new word for your students. Expansion idea: Discuss what would happen during a "grandma" infestation! ha ha
Click here to see a video of an ant (insect LOL) infestation. I like showing my students a visual of the other meaning too.
Clogging Problem-This one was a little harder for my students because many of them haven't heard of clogging (dancing) before. They knew what a clogged pipe was though! My students and I had fun attempting to clog dance ourselves after this video!
Here is the other type of "clogging" that can occur in a rental property!
You can also discuss that tap dancing is very similar to clogging (and show a video of that!).
Fencing Problem- A lot of my students didn't know about the sport of fencing. It was fun to teach them something new! We then discussed problems with fencing that can happen between neighbors (which neighbor owns the fence, where is the property line, who gets to decide to build the fence higher?? etc.. ha ha).
Here is a picture of the other kind of fencing:
Fans: This one is very cute and most students have some prior knowledge of both word meanings (sports fans and fans that cool/move the air)
Bucks: This one is another favorite. It is an older commercial (2014) but still great for teaching multiple meaning words and synonyms.
Here is a picture of the other kind of "buck!" I use the opportunity to discuss synonyms of these words too during these activities.
Synonyms of buck: cash, money, dollar, moolah, etc....
I hope you and your students have fun with these videos! Let me know in the comments how you plan to use them!
Click here to download your FREE worksheet to go with these commercials. You can also use it with any Multiple Meaning Words activity. I also included a BONUS MMW word list too !
I also have a digital version that goes with this blog post on BOOM Cards, click here to view it (this only has questions, you have to watch the videos here or on YouTube).
-Mandi
This method goes along with the explicit vocabulary teaching method that is proven to improve vocabulary retention with poor readers. A study by Elleman, A.M., Steacy, L.M., Olinghouse, N.G., Compton, D.L. (2017) found that the students who were taught o vocabulary had better outcomes than students who were just exposed to text by using the following key strategies:
determine the part of speech (e.g. noun vs. verb)
analyze for morphological clues
look for context clues
look up the definition of the word
Another study done by Wright, T.S., Cervetti, G. (2016) looked at the impact of vocabulary instruction on reading comprehension. The results found that:
Teaching word meanings to support comprehension vs. just being exposed to the text without explicitly getting the meaning presented.
Students need to be actively engaged in thinking about the word meaning (watching videos and looking at pictures is a great way to engage them).