Using Memes to Build Vocabulary

     Anyone who knows me knows that I love memes.  I constantly post them on my personal Facebook page and share them through texts to friends every chance I get; I find them hysterical. You know who else love memes?  That's right, middle-schoolers.  

     At a recent digital leader training meeting, a colleague from one of our high schools presented on how she uses memes to build vocabulary for her students.  Well that's all I needed to hear, so I took the information and ran with it.  Here is what I did, and I'll just tell you right now, it is the first time I've ever had students ask to do more vocabulary activities.  

     First, I determined the vocabulary words I wanted to attack.  We were starting a study of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe, so I selected the words of most use to them.  Research states that students should be exposed to vocabulary words at least seven times before they should be expected to retain and use the words in their everyday language.  So before going into the meme project, I front loaded vocabulary a few different ways.  First, I presented students with a pretest with the words to see if I really needed to teach what I thought I would.  After that, I provided students with the words, part of speech, synonyms, antonyms, and definitions.  In the past, I simply gave them the words and had them look up the information.  Big Mistake!  They had no idea which definition to use and simply picked random synonyms and antonyms listed online to complete the assignment. Then I sent them to my Quizlet page to get a little more practice with the words.  The next day, students were given a few minutes to become an expert on one word each and then took part in a Kagan cooperative activity called "Find Someone Who" in which they met up with multiple classmates to share information on the words.  As this was taking place, we were also doing a close reading of the story.  Finally, they were ready for the meme project.

     I used the site https://imgflip.com/memegenerator and shared the link through my Google Classroom.  Then I modeled how to create a meme; most of them already knew.  I paired students up and gave each team two words to create memes for.  Their goal was to find a photograph and add the verbage to demonstrate their understanding of how the word is used.  They then had to download their meme and add it to the Google Slides presentation I created for each of my classes.  At the conclusion of the activity, we viewed the presentation and had some really good laughs.  It was super simple for me to assess students' understanding; some of them did a fantastic job, and some needed a little extra instruction-pretty par for the course in my opinion.  I highly suggest experimenting with memes-just be careful, some images can be for mature eyes.