Blending Passion and Vocabulary Skills!

We have just started the Spring semester at my school and I was eager to get the Passion conversation going!  This semester I am teaching a high level Vocabulary class to about 15 adult students.  I found myself thinking how can I merge vocabulary instruction and Passion.  I came up with this great activity inspired by the PASSION acronym from The Passion Driven Classroom by Angela Maiers and Amy Sandvold.  The acronym goes like this:

                 Perseverance 

                 Action driven 

                 Strength building 

                 Sustainable 

                 Inquisitive 

                 Ownership 

                 Never-ending

According to the book, this language gives us the action and language to build a passion driven classroom.  In other words, to have passion and to work with passion, you need these things.  I wanted to convey this to my students however, I knew that the language would be unfamiliar to them so I turned it into a vocabulary activity.

I paired students and gave them each a different letter.  They had to define the word and then explain why or how this word relates to Passion.  Each group took turns explaining their letter while the other groups filled in the empty spaces.  It was a great collaborative class activity.  From there we went on to define Passion in our own words by explaining the who, what, when, where, and why as a class.

The combination of these two activities was a great way to kickoff our Passion Driven Classroom!  Below you can find links to the activities, if you try it out in your classroom let me know how it goes!

Passion Acronym 
Passion Grid