My Second graders are given quick assessments for word knowledge throughout the week. Here are a couple of examples. I put 2 or 3 words on the whiteboard and read a definition from the Cobuild dictionary. On their whiteboards they write the correct word, write the number of the word or simply say the word aloud to their partner. You can also reverse this by writing the definition and they have to identify the vocabulary word from their list. They also enjoy any variation of the Snowball activity we used last year in Math. It can easliy be adapted for use with vocabulary assessment.