The Vocabulary Bowl is an annual competition that allows students at your school to compete with thousands of schools across North America. The more words that students master on Vocabulary.com, the better the school does on the Vocabulary Bowl leaderboards.

Overall winners on the monthly school leaderboards receive banners, and at the end of the school year the winning school gets a championship trophy in a special ceremony at the school. In addition, there are many other opportunities for your students to shine on the leaderboards, whether they are competing against schools on the local, statewide, or national level.

Since competition can be a powerful motivating force for student achievement, we would like to share some ideas about how you can inspire the students at your school to get involved with the Vocabulary Bowl, setting achievable goals that will provide incentives to keep them going on the road to vocabulary mastery.

Learn about the Bowl!

If you’re not already familiar with how the Vocabulary Bowl works, your very first step should be to visit the Bowl page, which has all the information you need about how your school can join the nationwide competition.

What Administrators Can Do

If you are a principal or other school leader, here are some ways you can make vocabulary learning a priority at your school by getting students excited about playing the Vocabulary Bowl.

  • Set goals for your school. There are many different attainable goals you can set for the students at your school. Along with overall nationwide leaderboards, we also break down leaders state by state in separate leaderboards.

    • Daily: You can power your school to the top of the daily leaderboards by getting students to pull together on a particular day of your choosing. You can organize a special Vocabulary Bowl event for that day. Promote the event in advance by sending emails to students and parents. (Check out how the 2014-15 champion, Houston’s Chavez High School, organized special vocab events here.)

    • Monthly: In addition to making a push to get your students to the top of the monthly leaderboards, you can also set more modest goals. Why not make it a schoolwide goal for each student to master 10 words in a month? Additionally, you can make a push at the end of the month to move up the state or national rankings. Or you can create a rivalry with another school in your district to see which school masters the most words in the month.

    • Yearly: While the big prize at the end of the school year is for the overall leader in the nationwide Vocabulary Bowl, you can tailor your own school’s yearly goals in any number of ways. Make the goals attainable by focusing on how your school is doing not just at the national level, but also at the state level and the district level. If you set up a monthly competition with a rival school in your district, then bragging rights belong to whichever school has mastered the most words at the end of the school year.

  • Publicize achievements. Keep track of how your school is doing on the leaderboards, as well as how individual students and classes are excelling. (Our administrator dashboard will help you keep track.) Then, use your school’s PA system, bulletin boards, or school newsletter to publicize those achievements and bring recognition to your high-performing students. You can make daily, weekly, or monthly announcements.

  • Use social media. Of course, one of the best ways these days to get the word out to students is to use social media. If you have a Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram account for your school, make good use of social-media outreach to your teachers and students with words of encouragement and appreciation for their achievements in the Vocabulary Bowl.

  • Use your school page. Each school that competes in the Vocabulary Bowl has its own dedicated school page that shows its performance in the Bowl. Students, teachers, and administrators who have signed up for Vocabulary.com can find the school page by going to their account page and clicking on the name of their school. The school page is constantly refreshing with real-time updates of your students’ vocabulary mastery, so you can display it on a monitor for students to see their progress. You can also print out the school page, for instance at the end of the month to show the students’ monthly achievements.

What Teachers Can Do

  • Sign up for Vocabulary.com and create classes. If you haven’t done it already, sign up as an educator on Vocabulary.com, and get started by creating classes for every period you teach. Once you’re set up, you’ll be able to monitor the performance of each class using the Teacher Dashboard.

  • Make lists for your classes to play. Vocabulary.com makes it easy for you to create and assign vocabulary lists for your students to work on, no matter what your curricular needs. You can search through our library of lists or make your own list from any text. Then, when you assign lists to your students, all of their progress will count toward your school’s overall achievement in the Vocabulary Bowl.

  • Create competition within and between classes. When you set up classes on Vocabulary.com, each class will have its own leaderboard that will be visible to students. Use your class leaderboard to get competition going within the classroom. Then, why not challenge another class, setting a daily, weekly, or monthly goal to see which class can come out on top? Students will see that any individual progress they make by competing in the classroom will also count toward your school’s overall achievements in the Vocabulary Bowl.

  • Get the Vocabulary.com Classroom Starter Kit. One of the benefits of Vocabulary.com is how quickly and intuitively students can get up and running learning words. With our handy Classroom Starter Kit, teachers can first review best practices and some of the game's in and outs as they get started. Whether you're just starting out with Vocabulary.com or have been using it for months, the Starter Kit has great insights for teaching your students. It explains how to create an account, set up classes, make and share vocabulary lists, and get your students excited about playing. You can find it here, complete with links for downloading the kit as a PDF, as well as a customizable Certificate of Merit you'll want to use to recognize your students' achievements.