Compare and Contrast with vocabulary words

Finally a blog post about reading!  This past week we read a portion of a story called, Riding Freedom.  My school uses Houghton Mifflin Journeys and the stories are incredible.  Each week we ask the students questions where they have to refer to the text to find or infer the answers.  The question was about vocabulary:    Based on paragraph 2 and 3 which word is similar to the word route?  Two of the choices were road and highway.  All the students chose the word road but I was curious to see if they could tell me the difference between the two words.  So we created a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the two words, compare and contrast was our skill for the week.  I would love to use this strategy with vocabulary words, I will need to create a list of words that I could use for this activity.  I was amazed at what they were able to come up with to compare the two words.

Here is our completed Venn diagram.  Let me know what you think.