Ancient Civilizations Word Wall
Have you ever used an Ancient Civilization word wall before? Teaching with a word wall can be a useful strategy to help your students remember and understand vocabulary words that accompany the historical content you are teaching. We briefly mentioned word walls (and some of the challenges that go along with teaching vocabulary) in this past blog post, but we wanted to go more in depth about how to use a word wall in today’s post.
The first important task when preparing a word wall is deciding which words to include and what you want to have on the cards. Some cards just have the word, some have the word and a definition, and some include an image. In our teaching experience, we have found the most helpful versions have the word, the definition, and a picture, which is helpful for our visual learners. We like to include the definitions because it can create a “dictionary wall” of sorts that your students can refer back to throughout the year. You can see examples of this template in our Ancient Civilization Word Wall.
Once you have decided which words you will include, you will then decide how you want to organize them. You can see a few examples in the pictures below.
Vocabulary Word of the Day
To break up your Ancient Civilizations vocabulary words into smaller, more manageable pieces, consider teaching one word per day. Going over the vocabulary at a gradual pace allows you to go into more depth with each word. You could even use this as part of your daily warm-up!
Organize by Theme
You could also organize the words by theme. While elementary teachers or teachers of younger students might organize words by the letter that they start with, consider organizing the words by theme to help students make connections. For example, you might create categories of people, types of government, places, inventions, and more! For your convenience, our Ancient Civilization Word Wall cards are color coded by civilization, so you could use this method but still have a way for students to remember which word belongs to which civilization.
Ancient Civilizations Word Walls for Each Unit
If you have limited wall space or simply want to break up your Ancient Civilizations word wall by unit, display the words for your unit all at once on a bulletin board or a certain portion of your classroom. This is the method we have used, and there is usually a student or two who would love to help you change out the board after they have finished an assignment.
If you are interested in checking out our Ancient Civilizations word wall cards, check out our epic bundle here, or any of our individual sets below.
Prehistory + Early Humans Word Wall
Mesopotamia Word Wall
Ancient Egypt Word Wall
Ancient India Word Wall
Ancient China Word Wall
Ancient Greece Word Wall
Ancient Rome Word Wall
Middle Ages Word Wall
While not every ancient civilizations class teaches these topics, since we published this blog post, we have also added word wall sets for Mesoamerica, Early African Empires, and Ancient Israel!
Are you looking for some new teaching ideas to engage your students in your social studies class? If so, you’ll love our FREE guide: 5 Creative Projects to Ignite Student Engagement in Your Social Studies Class. These activities have both printable and digital options and can work for any social studies subject!
