GCSE English: 10 Vocabulary Learning Homework Tasks & Tests (Low Stakes, No marking!)

I don’t know about you but a lot of my students don’t read – much, at all, ever (unless in the classroom and that sometimes takes some coercion!). That means that the development of their vocabulary is essentially restricted to what they hear rather than what they read. This is a worry, considering that both of the written texts that they have to produce in the GCSE English exams are marked on the use of sophisticated vocabulary (amongst many other things).

However, my students do respond to a little gentle competition. I wanted to create a resource that would give them something to do for homework (the dreaded word!) but which wouldn’t take a huge amount of time. Not only that, I didn’t want to give the words VOCABULARY or SPELLING too much prominence either – the students would run for the hills (metaphorically at least). Finally I did not want to increase my workload (in terms of marking) in any way, shape or form.

So I came up with WORD GYM. The idea is that each week ten words will be given out to students. This is called the warm up – where they have to go away and discover for themselves the definition and word class of the week’s chosen words (all KS4) plus write a sentence for each word.

The follow up is the work out – the ten minute (or so) test in class where they are presented with a variety of questions.

This resource consists of:

10 warm ups (this is the homework) containing ten words each
10** work outs** (this is the test for the classroom).
The questions and answers for the 10 work outs.
Rinse and repeat. However, work outs 2-10 have 15 questions, 10 from that week’s warmup and 5 about any of the words on previous work outs.

The short tests work very well and it is hoped that you will start to see some of the words being used in other texts your students create.

These resources are all editable so if you don’t want to use a word or two you can adapt them to suit yourself.

These exercises cover the following Assessment Objectives:
AO5: Communicate clearly, effectively and imaginatively, selecting and adapting tone, style and register for different forms, purposes and audiences. Organise information and ideas, using structural and grammatical features to support coherence and cohesion of texts
AO6: Candidates must use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation.