Vocabulary Notebooks

​Vocabulary Notebooks was a small project that I did with lower secondary school teachers in Suzhou, China during the summer training of 2019, an ongoing British Council project. The five-day training ran three times.

The teachers were tasked with writing their own little vocabulary book using some of the techniques, procedures and activities that they experienced during the week. They were given three sheets of A4 and one piece of A4 coloured card – they folded these to make an A5 booklet. And on the last day we had a "Book Fair" where they displayed their booklets on the tables that we had moved into the centre of the room.

The training aspect of this project is the exemplification of a procedure that the teachers can do with their students as a whole-year project using a full exercise book. By the end of the year, the students will have created their own book, hopefully with considerable care and thought. This should be something that the students can be very proud of.

 Unit 36 of  The Book of How To is a lesson plan for introducing students to vocabulary notebooks. You can download this unit from the bottom of this page.

Here are some of the teachers' pages. The last three pictures show the final days' book fairs.  Click a picture to see it in full.