25+ Valuable Vocabulary Activities for High School

If you’d like to expand your high schoolers’ vocabulary beyond online slang and texting jargon, you’ll need to look past standard vocabulary lists and quizzes. The best vocabulary activities for high school get students engaged, working together, and using critical thinking to add vital words to their lexicon. And best of all, you can do it in any subject, not just ELA!

These teacher-approved high school vocab lessons, game ideas, review strategies, and teaching resources will help you grow your curriculum as you grow students’ vocabulary. You’ll also find online resources for independent practice and tips for implementation to make reluctant readers into word nerds (or sesquipedalians, if you prefer!).

Activities to Introduce High School Vocabulary Words 

Teaching high school vocabulary words doesn’t have to be a drill-type exercise. Use individual lessons and group activities for high school history, ELA, science, and any other class where students need to add words to their daily usage.

• Frayer Model: Have students create a four-section square to write a new word’s definition, characteristics, examples, and non-examples.
• Break It Apart: Start the school year with a lesson on suffixes and prefixes, and have students break their new vocabulary words apart as soon as they’re assigned.
• Cloze Activity: Before you give definitions for a vocabulary word list, give students a Cloze activity with only a word bank for them to rely on context clues for each word.
• Match Game: Provide students with word definitions and write matching words on the board; see how many they can get right.
• Connotation and Denotation: When students receive new vocabulary word lists, have them list their different connotations and denotations on a graphic organizer.

Infuse new vocabulary into your daily routine

The best way to learn new words is to add them every day! Choose resources aligned to ELA CCSS for vocabulary skills that fold vocabulary practice into your daily class routine.

Vocabulary Bell Ringers for a Full Year | Designed for use in 9-10th grade
By Lit and More
Grades: 9th-12th
Subjects: English Language Arts, Vocabulary
Standards: CCSS W.9-10.2d

Bring the “word-a-day” concept to your high school ELA class with bellringers that teach students new words every period. The resource includes a slideshow with a year of PSAT and ACT vocabulary words, along with implementation and extension ideas for each slide.

Vocab Games for High School Students

Get teens excited about new words with vocab games for high school students. From classic class games to creative twists on old favorites, these fun activities for high schoolers are a great way to practice vocabulary words.

• Taboo: Give one student a card with a vocabulary word and five related words they’re not allowed to say. See if their team can guess the right word.
• Balderdash: Give students a word with one real definition and two possible (but funny!) definitions, and have them vote on which one they think is real.
• Bingo: Have students write their vocabulary words onto a blank Bingo sheet, then call out definitions to see who can mark five in a row.
• Vocabulary Go Fish: Create a poker card game for high schoolers to trade cards so they can match pairs of words and their definitions.
• Vocab Pictionary: On the whiteboard, have one student depict their word with pictures for their team to guess quickly.

Make vocabulary review fun and engaging for everyone

The best vocabulary activities for high school are the ones that help students remember their words and definitions. Include a variety of vocab activities for older grades that make SAT and CCSS work feel like fun and games!

Vocabulary Games & Vocabulary Activities – Middle School & High School Vocab Fun
By Carla McLeod
Grades: 6th-10th
Subjects: English Language Arts, For All Subjects, Vocabulary
Standards: CCSS L.7.4, 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d; L.7.5, 5c; CCRA.L.4, 5, 6

Who says high school vocabulary activities have to feel like work? Use these fun yet challenging vocabulary activities that work with any word list. This well-rounded resource includes graphic organizers, activities that focus on word roots and morphemes, and word sorts to reinforce meaning and context.

Brain-Based Vocabulary Activities for High School, Speed Dating, Game, Continuum
By Reading and Writing Haven
Grades: 9th-12th
Subjects: English Language Arts, Vocabulary
Standards: CCSS.L.9-10.4, 6; L.11-12.4, 6

If you want your vocabulary lessons to stick long after the quiz is over, use these vocabulary exercises to help students add words to their regular lexicon. It includes a continuum and rubric, a game with a scorekeeping sheet, and a speed-dating activity in which students pretend to be their assigned word.

High School Vocab Review Activities

If there’s a vocabulary assessment coming up, it’s time to buckle down and master that word list. These deeper-level review activities get high schoolers thinking about the words they’ve learned and what they really mean.

• Vocabulary Sentences: Have students write funny, memorable sentences that use vocabulary words in the proper context.
• Dice Review: Assign each vocabulary word a number, and have students roll dice to quiz each other on each word.
• Synonym Search: Encourage students to match words with the proper synonym from a word bank, or have them come up with their own synonyms (or antonyms).
• Wrong Word: Create warm-up sentences that use the vocabulary words of the week incorrectly, and prompt students to correct them.
• Growing Lexicon: Include past vocabulary words along with current words in a review worksheet or activity to see if students still remember all the definitions.

Connect vocabulary and word choice for high school students

It’s one thing to memorize words and definitions, but quite another to understand the connections between words, their meanings, and how they affect the rest of a piece of writing. Use these review resources to get students thinking about the importance of word choice in their writing.

Shades of Meaning Tone Activities Worksheet Identifying Tone Vocabulary AP Lang
By Angie Kratzer
Grades: 9th-11th
Subjects: Vocabulary, Writing, Writing-Expository
Standards: CCSS RL.8.4, 9-10.4, 11-12.4; RI.8.4, 9-10.4, 11-12.4

Teach students why word choice matters in an activity that focuses on the relationship between vocabulary and tone. Designed for AP Language students but applicable to any high school ELA class, this CCSS-aligned resource includes a Google Slideshow, suggestions for use, ten sets of tone words, definition charts, graphic organizers, and more.

Creative Vocabulary Assessments for High Schoolers

Tired of handing out and grading vocab quizzes every week? Find more creative ways to check for vocabulary retention and understanding in high school classes, novel units, and larger research projects.

• Vocab Posters: Give individual students or groups one word to feature in a classroom poster to demonstrate understanding and help peers learn new words.
• Write It Out: Encourage your class to include all of their vocabulary words in writing prompts for high school along with context clues.
• Future Careers: Prompt students to choose vocabulary words that they may use (and explain why) in their future during a career exploration unit.
• Word Skits: Have groups design skits that use the assigned vocabulary words and teach the audience the words’ meaning in an organic way.
• Comic Wordplay: Assign a comic strip or graphic novel project in which students use words from their vocabulary list in dialogue, then add the next few panels from the next week’s vocabulary list.

Incorporate vocabulary review into a novel unit

Learning vocabulary in the context of a novel unit can be much more effective than learning those words in isolation. Find ways for your novel unit assessments to reflect both reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge.

Interactive Bookmarks for Any Novel: Questions, Literary Analysis, Vocabulary
By The Daring English Teacher
Grades: 6th-11th
Subjects: Close Reading, English Language Arts, Reading Strategies

Have students take their vocabulary words wherever they go with an interactive bookmark activity that combines vocabulary review with a novel unit. On the front, students add the novel’s title, genre, author, timeline, quotations, and vocabulary words, and on the back, they answer reading comprehension questions and provide a short summary of the book.

Online Vocabulary Activities for High School

Could your students use some low-stakes ways to increase their vocabulary outside the classroom? Whether they’re preparing for upcoming standardized tests or trying to improve their college-level writing, high schoolers can use these digital tools to improve their personal glossaries.

• IXL: Find grade-level review activities that focus on important vocab skills, broken down by grade level.
• Vocabulary.com: Enter your class into the Vocabulary Bowl to compete against students from all over the country. 
• Free Rice: Every time students play an educational trivia game, they earn rice for the World Food Program to donate around the world.

A strong vocabulary reflects a strong education

Well-designed vocabulary activities for high school help teens use advanced vocabulary words and identify connections between those words and pieces of writing or real-life scenarios. These skills aren’t just important for ELA class; they’re vital life skills for high school students to demonstrate their strong educational foundation. Find more vocabulary resources for high school to use in the classroom, and enjoy the ease of bringing no-prep resources into your vocabulary curriculum!