The Virginia Studies curriculum has SO MANY people, places, and vocabulary words for fourth and fifth grade Virginia students to learn. IYKYK! And while I love sorting activities, games, and task cards for reviewing Virginia Studies vocabulary, my favorite way to support students is with a focus wall or word wall.
Why?
It serves as a visual support for all students and especially those who are learning English or need more assistance retaining new vocabulary. It helps provide reminders about the meanings of trickier words. And it’s especially helpful for those repetitive terms that keep coming up in different SOLs, like economy or colony.
What to Include On a Virginia Studies Vocabulary Word Wall
The beauty of a word wall or content wall is that it can look however you like! I personally love to display vocabulary word cards that include visuals and definitions. You can even have your students make these themselves.
But I also love to include posters for the important people and places that we teach as part of the Virginia Studies SOLs. This works well so you can refer back to them throughout the year.
This is also a great space to include social studies anchor charts that you create with your students.
How to Use Your VS Word Wall
I’m not a fan of classroom displays that go up and then get forgotten about. There’s not enough wall space for that! We want to create a resource that really helps students learn and retain vocabulary and important concepts.
But how you use it is up to you! You may choose to display all the key terms from a unit when you start it, or you might add information as you teach it.
Once it’s up on the wall, I love for this to serve as an interactive bulletin board! Students can:
- quiz each other (students can point with a flashlight to the correct card, or just name it)
- remove a card from the wall if they need help with spelling
- use for matching games
- use for sequencing sorts
You can also copy the cards and posters at a smaller size to add to interactive notebooks or to make study aids.
And if you like to incorporate VS SOLs into your language arts block, this content wall makes a great reference tool for reading and writing.
Virginia Studies Vocabulary Cards Done for You
If you love this idea but don’t have the time to create all the pieces, I’ve got you! I’ve created a yearlong bundle of Virginia Studies word wall cards and posters that supports the entire VS curriculum.
For each SOL/unit, the bundle includes:
- vocabulary cards with definitions and visuals
- vocabulary cards with visuals only
- important people cards
- important places cards
- posters
What I love about this resource is not only is it a huge time-saver for creating a word wall, but it can be used in lots of ways!
It’s also low-prep! Just involves printing, laminating (optional), and cutting!
You can find more Virginia SOL-aligned word wall cards and posters here!
Saving some space in your classroom to create a Virginia Studies word wall is a FANTASTIC way to support instruction. I love seeing different ways that teachers support Virginia Studies vocabulary in their classrooms. Feel free to tag me on social media so I can see how you like to do it!
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