Vocabulary Instruction

Vocabulary instruction is key to comprehension in the content areas, such as history, social studies, and science. Well, I guess it’s key to understanding anything that you are trying to teach. 

I’m teaching summer school to a group of rising first graders in an area with a high percentage of Spanish speaking families. Some of these kiddos don't have any English spoken in their home, which makes it real tough for them to know what’s going on in the classroom. We were singing a silly camp song about ravioli, and one girl was just looking around the room with a completely confused look on her face. She had no idea what this ravioli was about! After taking time to explain the words in the song, she understood a little better. 

How many times does this happen in the classroom? Many students (not just your ESL/ELL learners) struggle with vocabulary. They can be just as confused in class as this sweet girl was about ravioli! So what do we do? 

I think that our biggest obstacle is time. We’d love to spend a day or two really working on the vocabulary. But we must keep moving and plowing through to make sure we finish. Or, we give up time so we can focus on those subjects that are tested. Because we all know those are more important. Or at least that’s what we’re forced into thinking. (Can you tell I despise what we are doing to our children with these government issued mandates that don’t allow us to teach?) 

I digress… 

Since we cannot do anything about the time constraints that we have in our classroom, we must find ways to infuse vocabulary instruction into what we do. 

“Learners move from not knowing a word, to being somewhat acquainted with it, to attaining a deeper, richer knowledge that allows them to use new words in many modalities of expression.” -Camille Blackowicz and Peter Fisher, 2012 

Our students fall into one of these three categories: 
1. Not knowing the words they encounter in their instruction, 
2. Having a loose familiarity with the words, or 
3. Knowing the words well enough to use them in their own expressions of their learning. 

I think we all want our students to be at the third category, but too often, we don’t give them enough time with the words to master them. 

Check out the list below for some different activities that can help you move your students from vocabulary confusion to mastery. 

1. Reading immersion! When students encounter new words in texts that they are invested     in, the words stay with them. 
2. Understanding Context Clues Strategies 
3. Learn Synonyms and Antonyms 
4. Importance of learning word stems and origins 
5. Vocabu-ladders! 
6. Vocabulary Games 

I will write more blog posts on each of these topics soon to give you a plethora of ideas to help you as you plan for teaching vocabulary to your students. What’s one way that you include vocabulary instruction in your classroom? I’d love to have a list of strategies here that we can share with each other!

  Martha