Want to know how a vocab choice board can help you in the classroom? I’ll tell you right away! Because it helps engage students, because it’s a print and go activity, and because you can differentiate teaching. In addition, research shows that students need to feel autonomy, competence and relatedness when they learn, and choice boards are great for accomplishing that!
First, with a choice board, students will have the autonomy to choose their own tasks from the sheet. It’s up to them to pick their activity. In that regard, they can choose the tasks that would make them feel competent and like they’re practising something at their own level. And last, a choice board will help them connect to others in that it will ask them to learn about other people or work together with them. When these basic needs are met, intrinsic motivation will increase.
Want to see what a choice board can look like? Grab this free one about Christmas from my TPT store by clicking here!
What is a choice board in education
What is a choice board, you ask? A choice board is a sheet that contains a number of tasks that students must choose a few from that they will complete. They would not complete ALL the tasks on the sheet, as the point is for them to choose the ones they’d like to undertake. You as the teacher would include a variety of language tasks on a vocab choice board, and add activities at various levels that students would choose from.
You could either have this be a sheet that you print, students tell you which they choose, and you would give them the printed tasks that they want to choose. Or you could use QR codes that students would scan on their devices and that would take them to these tasks. And the last possibility would be that you’d give them a link on which you share the digital choices to choose from. Then students would access these digital options via their device as well.
Choice board ideas
In order to practice vocabulary, you could come up with a variety of ways in which students would revise. Some vocabulary choices examples for choice boards include:
- Reading a text about the vocabulary topic
- Listening to a text about it
- Writing a piece of text using the vocab words
- Recording a spoken text using the vocab words
- Playing a Kahoot that the teacher would assign, not play in whole group setting
- Or playing a game like dominoes, memory, pictionary, etc.
You’d have to create one such choice board ahead of time of course. It would take some time to collect spoken or written texts (videos or articles, etc) on the topic you want to cover, as well as grab links to digital activities. And you’d have to stick them on a sheet in an orderly fashion so that students can easily navigate it. Check out my free Christmas Choice Board that I made to see how I did it. And in my blog post about QR codes I’ve explained all about how to create those, and what to use them for.
But when you have it, you can use it forever, and it will just be so much fun for your students!
Digital choice board examples
Wanna make it a digital choice board? So that your students can just go to a website and find all the options in a clear, clickable environment? Then you might like to use Padlet! Padlet lets you post a host of things on a wall, like links, images, videos, texts, etc, and you can just give your students the link to that. I’ve also used Linktree before. Linktree provides you with a very clear, clean list of links, but it’s not immediately clear where they links will lead you, which it is in Padlet.
Don’t want to go through all this trouble, but still use choice boards?
Here are some choice board examples I made for my students over the years that I’ve posted in my TPT store, so that you can use them too!
- Mother’s Day
- Saint Patrick’s Day
- Easter
- Christmas
- Spring
- Valentine’s Day
- Winter
- And Thanksgiving
Check out the whole bundle of them by clicking here, or see each separate one here.
No matter how, I hope you try giving your students choice boards! I just love it when I’ve put work into creating these meaningful tasks, and I can just give the board to students, and they are off! Such a good feeling 🙂
Related articles:
9 ways to use QR codes in the classroom
5 super fun Padlet ideas to teach remotely or in the classroom
