ABSTRACT
Student engagement is high when kids feel they will be participating in a pleasant experience. Active learning can also help meet the needs of students who learn best through multisensory instruction to develop visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile pathways to language learning. Hearts, flowers, superheroes, monsters, and doodles of all kinds cover notebooks and edges of assignment sheets in the middle grades. Word Colors is a quick, favorite activity, but it also requires students to think at high levels. Students choose a color to represent a word and justify their choice. Students love Word Colors, and it seems to help them attach a meaning with a word. Teachers were amazed to see that students who often struggle in school also quickly got to work and thought of original ways to illustrate words. Content-area teachers have found that Illustrated Vocabulary works especially well with disciplinary terms.
