When I think of vocabulary and a means to build vocabulary skills, I think of our current tutoring sessions at Oak Grove. During these tutoring session it is our responsibility to help introduce students to at least 4 new vocabulary words per week. I found it difficult to find a strategy to use that was interesting and incorporated skills that my student could use on her on, when trying to decode words for pronunciation and meaning. The book depicted strategies that I used such as the vocabulary cards and vocabulary prediction. I believe that it is a teachers responsibility to introduce new vocabulary to his/her students inside the classroom but also provide them with tools to decode words on their own.
As I observe and help my after school students complete their homework, I notice that they are all required to do the same thing, when it comes to learning new words. Each student from K to 4th grade is required to write each of their words 5 to 7 times. In my opinion, this is just busy work. When I engage these students in identifying and spelling these words, mainly the K and 1st grade students don’t even know the words. Meaning that when they wrote the words they were just copying them from a list, not even knowing what the word is. I found this very interesting that students are just copying words out of routine and not being encouraged to decode or sound out words to know how to pronounce or identify the words in a sentence. ( I hope that makes sense) ;-)
When I think back to my adolescents, I remember my teacher engaging me and my entire class in activities that encouraged us to use the dictionary to help us in learning new words and their meanings. In this private school setting, word recognition was at the for front of many of our lessons. The teacher would lead our class into meaningful lessons that required us to use sources to help us to first syllabicate words, then pronounce words, define words, and lastly use the word in sentences. This being only one of several activities that we used to build word recognition.
The book did a great job of describing the importance of having a vast knowledge of words and their meanings. It described how word recognition should be intertwined into other subjects and even electives. A students word knowledge can determine how successful a student will be in their learning. If they are not given the proper tools they need to gain new word knowledge from their teachers than many of them will not be successful in their educational journey. Lastly this statement from the book left a great impression on me, “The gap in word knowledge is problematic because of its impact on content learning and reading comprehension.” With this information in mind, I will try my best to equip my students with the tools they need to be successful. I will not follow the same old mundane of just giving students words to copy that they can’t pronounce and don’t know the meaning of or even how to use it in a sentence.
Question
- When teachers present their lesson plan to the administration, why don’t they encourage teachers to do other activities that build word recognition instead of just okaying them to require students to write words several times over and over?
