Rally your students and prepare them for word domination!

Motivate your students to reach their vocabulary goals and give them a reason to celebrate as they climb the leaderboards. In Vocabulary.com’s biannual academic competition, students improve their literacy skills, work together as a team, and experience academic success.

Register for the Vocabulary Bowl

These best practices for implementing Vocabulary.com during the Vocabulary Bowl will help your students stay engaged in the competition and motivated to complete fun word learning activities.

Get into the habit of a word workout

The easiest way to rack up Vocabulary Bowl points is to assign 10 minutes of VocabTrainer per day as part of their homework assignment. Students will build vocabulary, contribute to their school’s points, and create an easy habit of using Vocabulary.com daily.

Keep track of student activity in your Teacher Dashboard:

  1. Sign in to Vocabulary.com and go to My Classes from the hamburger menu
  2. Click on the metric you want to keep track of (questions answered, words mastered, time spent, etc.)
  3. After clicking on a metric, you can see the progress of each student by day

Pro tip: Consistent use daily is the key to climbing the leaderboards. We have developed new materials to keep students engaged and motivated to focus on word mastery throughout the Bowl season.

Offer incentives to students depending on the metric you want to track (i.e. for every 5-10 words mastered, they get one of these printable coupons). On the coupons, you can add your own rewards! An example would be one pass on a homework assignment.

15-minute warm-up

Another quick way to get your students to progress in their word mastery is implementing a 15-minute Vocabulary.com warmup. Have students sign in to their Vocabulary.com account and click VocabTrainer from the navigation bar. Then just have them answer questions for 15 minutes.

Pro tip: In 15 minutes, students can typically complete 3-4 rounds of VocabTrainer or a Practice assignment. This is a great and fun way to ease students into the class period. After each session, have them fill out a row on this student activity log to have them write a sentence using a word they just learned!

Pump up your current curriculum

Pair your current reading assignment with one of our 13,000+ curriculum-aligned vocabulary lists! Students can earn points for the Bowl while completing relevant Practice assignments. Assign a list from our library of curriculum-aligned resources:

   1. Sign in to Vocabulary.com and go to Vocabulary Lists.

   2. Search for a book or text that your class is currently reading.

   3. Choose the chapters you want to assign then click “Practice”.

   4. Choose the class you want to assign it to then add the assignment details:

  • Start and due dates
  • Including spelling questions
  • Including review questions from past assignments
  • Optional notes for students

   5. Then click “Assign Practice”.

Pro tip: Can’t find the list you need? Use InstaList to create your own! Paste up to 100 pages of text from anywhere, from news articles to science textbooks, and we’ll instantly handpick the most relevant vocabulary words for a custom list.

Set SMART goals

The Vocabulary Bowl is a great way to teach students how to set SMART goals and practice reaching them. This encourages students to see how their effort is directly contributing to their school’s points. Here’s an implementation idea:

  • Before the Bowl starts, set a goal of mastering words with your students (Don’t be afraid to aim high but keep it reachable!)
  • Print out this progress tracker on poster paper or use it as an example to create your own.
  • On a weekly or daily basis, spend some time with your class to announce where they are in reaching their goals. This will help students practice goal-setting and encourage them to see how their effort is directly contributing to their school’s points.

Pro tip: Laminate your progress tracker and use an Expo marker or magnets to mark the progress so you can reuse it for future seasons!

Host your own Bowl

Rally rivals between classes for an extra layer of competition! Students may be more motivated and excited to compete against their own classmates.

My Leaderboard provides personalized insight, making it easy to track, compare, and reward the progress of your students. My Leaderboard allows educators to see scores side by side, making it easy to host competitions within classes or schools! Visualize progress, host fun competitions, and incentivize word learning!

Announce the rankings at the end of each week to shake up the competition! Students will have fun competing against each other while adding points to the school’s overall score.

Pro tip: Incentivize students with prizes! If you’re having multiple classes compete against each other, a fun and easy prize would be a pizza party.

Set up your school for success and get ready for word domination! Good luck and may the best vocabularians win.

Kick off word learning

Host a kickoff party to get students excited about the start of the Bowl! Print and hang up this Vocabulary Bowl poster to remind and keep students motivated.

We’ve already been tagged in a bunch of social media posts and love to see how excited everyone is!

If you post on social media, share how you plan to motivate your students for the Bowl. Make sure to tag us, we’d love to see it:

Are you ready for the Vocabulary Bowl this year? Register now to compete against schools across the U.S. and Canada in the biggest academic competition of all time!

Register for the Vocabulary Bowl