June 16th Vocabulary

The article Vocabulary Lessons discusses the lack of resources available about teaching vocabulary in schools. It then describes four practices that educations can use to "implement a comprehensive approach to vocabulary development." The first is to "develop word awareness and love of words through word play" which uses playing with words to foster a love of words as well as helping children to develop metacognitive understanding about words. I think this is a great way to use children natural love of play to encourage them to learn new vocabulary in a fun way. The second is to "deliver explicit, rich instruction to develop important vocabulary" through the use of the STAR model of instruction. I liked the idea of this method because it gives a very clear road map as to how to teach vocabulary in an intentional way. The third practice is to "build strategies for independence" which stresses learning to use tools such as root words or the dictionary in order to decode words independently. The fourth and final practice is to "engage students actively with a wide range of books." This practice is the one I think may be the most important because child can be exposed to a huge variety of vocabulary words through the use of literature that they may not ever be exposed to in conversation.

The second article I read, The Early Catastrophe was about a research study that was done with lower, middle, and upper class families where their everyday conversations with their children were recorded and analyzed to see how many words each family used with their child. The recording began when the children were 7-9 months old and ended when they were 3 years old. The findings were overwhelming in that it became immediately apparent that the number of words a child knows is directly related to the number of words their parents know and use with their child. By age four, the average low SES child has had experience with 13 million fewer words than an upper SES child. I found this article amazing, although not surprising. The sheer amount of difference between the vocabulary experiences of these two levels of income is incredible to me however, I have always felt that there was a connection between parents vocabulary and children vocabulary. My parents never hesitated to use words that I did not know but they were always more than willing to define them and even spell them if I asked. Today I have a large vocabulary and I attribute it to the fact that my parents spoke to me like an adult even in my early childhood.


In The Vocabulary Rich Classroom the author stresses the use of adding new vocabulary words into conversations in the classroom. It talks about using different strategies such as promoting word strategies, selecting words to teach based on a 3 tier model, modeling the use of sophisticated vocabulary, being word conscious, as well as avoiding the temptation to dumb down our language to children. This last strategy really hit home with me because as I discussed in the previous paragraph, my own parents made a point not to dumb down their own speech just because my sister and I were young. I really feel that speaking to children as though they understand all of the words that you do is imperative in developing their vocabularies.

In chapter 6 of the book, I really enjoyed reading about bringing real things into the classroom and anchoring words to them. What a wonderfully simple teaching tool! The book describes taking item from home that your students might not know the name of and bringing them into the classroom and then having "show and talk" sessions. It also talks about playing 20 questions to try to describe objects. I think this is a great idea to reinforce the definitions of nouns in vocabulary lessons.