The purpose for this action research study was to answer the question: "How can we enhance students' active engagement with academic vocabulary in social studies classes?" In this article, the authors share the strategies they developed through their research that proved most effective in engaging middle school students with active academic vocabulary use in social studies. They consider both general academic words and content-specific words, and highlight the power of word walls, morphology practice, matching activities, word sorts, and vocabulary journals in helping students access the abstract and dense social studies texts they encounter in such classrooms. (Contains 4 figures.)