In my previous post I shared how I’m teaching students conjunctions to support their ability to create increasingly complex sentence forms and help them in comprehending increasingly complex written ideas. In this post, I’ll share an initial step I’m taking to help students develop their vocabulary knowledge by having them create vocabulary cards. I’ll also share some thoughts on how I’m planning to use the vocabulary cards to explicitly teach students specific words.
Specific expectation B2.2 in the revised Grades 1 – 8 Language curriculum (2023) calls educators to teach students to demonstrate their understanding of a wide variety of words in addition to helping them acquire and use explicitly taught vocabulary in various contexts. One of the ways that I’ve been striving to support students in acquiring and using new vocabulary is by having them self-select new or vaguely familiar words from the short stories they have been reading then create vocabulary cards.
To begin, I ask students to select a word from one of the short stories they’ve read. I then invite them to create vocabulary cards where they use an online dictionary to find a definition of the word that makes the most sense in the context of their story, identify the part of speech to which the word belongs, find two synonyms for the word, and create an image of what they envision when they read or hear the word. I then ask students to record the word, definition, and synonyms in their language notebook for future reference. Once students create their vocabulary card, I add it to our class vocabulary wall as reference tool that they can use when they are reading or writing. See images of our growing vocabulary wall attached.
I got the idea for vocabulary cards from reading the book, Visible Learning for Literacy: Implementing Strategies that Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning, by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie. In it the authors explain how word cards or what I call vocabulary cards can aid in helping students retain and recall information like new words.
To provide opportunities for students to practice using their new vocabulary in familiar contexts, I’ve been asking them use different vocabulary words during complex and compound-complex sentence practice exercises. From reading students sentences from practice exercises I gained insight to how accurately they use the vocabulary in addition to their ability to create increasingly complex sentence forms. From this teaching experience I also learned that having students identify new or vaguely familiar words, create vocabulary cards, and practice using them in a sentence is insufficient vocabulary instruction. Meaning, I’ve observed that without explicit vocabulary instruction and practice, the students I teach have yet to develop their ability to consistently use new vocabulary accurately in sentences. I now better understand why students require explicit vocabulary instruction and practice to support them in building their vocabulary knowledge.
One of the primary purposes I had students engage in the vocabulary card activity was to have them generate a list of words they do not know and want to learn to inform my instruction. From reading the Grades 3 – 5 Edition of Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Upper Elementary Classroom, I learned that for students to really know a word they need to know the individual sounds, how it is spelled, how it is used as a part of speech, and some of the multiple meanings connected to the word.
My next step is to create a list of words that I see multiple students identify and use those to begin my explicit instruction along with using a spelling program called Catch Up Your Code that provides explicit lessons on how to teach all the different spelling patterns found in the English language.
In preparation for instruction, I’m thinking of selecting 3 – 5 words per week to explicitly teach students. I think 3 – 5 words will be a manageable and reasonable amount taking into consideration the range of abilities, needs, resources, and time I have available. My explicit instruction will include a student friendly definition of the word, a review of the pronunciation, spelling patterns, morphemes included in the word, and direct connections to word networks meaning synonyms and/or antonyms.
Again, I gained these instructional approaches from reading the Grades 3 – 5 Edition of Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Upper Elementary Classroom.
I think that if we as educators really want to improve students’ vocabulary knowledge, then we must make time to explicitly teach them words which is what I’m striving to do. In a future post, I hope to share additional insights I’ve gained from utilizing these instructional approaches and how they have impacted students learning.
