Distribute dictionaries to student pairs.
Ask the students to look through the dictionaries with their partners and discuss amongst themselves what kind of information they can gather from a specific word entry and from different sections in the dictionary. Give them three to five minutes to complete the task.
Have a student from each pair come to the classroom chalkboard and write one observation. If you are pressed for time, the students can contribute vocally and you can put the observations on the board. If an important point is not brought up, add it yourself.
Discuss the points that the students contributed as a class.
Ask if there are any questions and answer them if there are any.
Pass out new notebooks to the students.
Tell the students that these notebooks will be used to collect interesting vocabulary words every week and that at the end of the term they will be collected to create classroom dictionaries.
Have the students create five entries per week. They may do one a day or five at the end of the week. Make sure that each entry includes, at a minimum, the part of speech of the word, the definition(s) and a sentence that demonstrates the word usage for each definition. Each entry should be on its own page.
Encourage the students to use the words that they make entries for in their regular work. Perhaps a reward or bonus points may give them a small push.
Collect the student notebooks.
Remove the cover of each notebook.
Hole punch the notebook pages.
Take the pages of the notebooks apart and reorganize them alphabetically.
Create a dictionary front cover and back cover from strong construction paper.
Hole punch the cover and loop the notebooks through with the tweed.