In the past, some teachers treated word learning as an isolated subject--a list of words that were not connected to content or literature studies. This article describes how Candy Mulligan, a teacher at the Center for Reading and Writing at Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ, teaches vocabulary by selecting words from the students' seventh and eighth grade social studies and science books, as well as words that she feels would be useful in her students' daily lives. Mrs. Mulligan lists five words on each student's daily "contract" and the children are given directions to choose one of those word, make a picture about it his or her mind, then define it by drawing that picture in order to illustrate the word's meaning. This type of exercise makes learning language more interesting and helps the students to develop metacognitive thinking.