While reading pages 237-240 in Tompkins (chapter 7) I was trying to think of ways that the students that I work with discussed/reviewed different vocabulary words as a class and I realized they rarely do! Last week was actually the first time I saw the students work in a group to go over and discuss words that were challenging from a book the teacher was reading aloud. They used a white board with a line down the middle, one side was the words beginning with "Sh" and the other side were the words beginning with "Ch". They were working on differentiating between the two starting letters/sounds. I could tell by observing them that they were enjoying the activity as they were able to write the words out on the whiteboard and work together. This was fun to see.
I also got to thinking about the reading program that their Internship Teacher (Ms. Showerman) and I do with the students. This program is designed to help the lowest leveled readers of our class. There are 7 students who are still at a first grade reading level so we work with them in 2 groups (be level), once a day, for a 1/2 hour in order to help them improve. During this time we read a short book alone, then together, and then we go through and review the vocabulary words we struggled with on at each page. While they are reading, I will have a white board in front of me and I will write down the words that they struggle with to remember which ones we for sure need to go over.
A lot of the time I notice the students struggle with the ending words such as "ing" or "ed", however when we break them apart and read them in different pieces, they do just fine. I think they have the mindset while reading that if the word looks longer, it is harder, so they struggle with words that have ending words. I have also noticed this program we've been doing with the students is helping them a lot. We have given them ways to recognize different sounds, like pinching your arm and saying "OUch" for "o" vowels, and we've taught them how to cover up the ending words in order to help them sound out each word, and overall they have grasped onto these quickly. I am excited to see how much they will progress by the end of the year! :)
I plan to use vocab for one of my reading instruction lessons, however I have not yet discussed with my mentor teacher what to do just yet.
This semester I don't see as much of the literacy centers as I used to however, our classroom does a lot of work with "word swats." We have two different word walls one relating to math terms and one with new vocab words. The student or teacher reads off the definition and the students have to race against eachother to swat the correct word from the definition with a fly swatter. I see a lot of tier 1-3 in the classroom within all subjects. During read alouds or new lessons the teacher selects new words that are interesting or not well known throughout the text and writes it on the board and than explains to the class what it means. From that I see that it is pretty effective in the classroom and the students seem to like it because it is interesting to see new words in the things that they are doing. The most of the words that are taught within the classroom are definitely tier one words. Tier three words come up with in the class but like it says are not used frequently enough.
ReplyDeleteKelsey, I really like the "word swats" you were talking about! That is a fun and engaging method for getting students excited about vocabulary! As for my class, I have not observed many vocabulary lessons thus far. This semester I am in the classroom during their centers, Chinese class, computer lab, social studies and math lessons. Therefore, I am not able to see what they are doing in language arts like I did last semester. One day during centers I helped a student answer some questions on a worksheet that had to do with matching certain definitions to terms that relate to language arts. For instance, there was a sentence explaining what a theme of a story is with a blank in the middle of the sentence and students had to pick the word from the word bank that fit the best in the sentence. A lot of the students did not know many of the terms and therefore it was really difficult for them to complete the worksheet. Another time I observed students working on vocabulary was during a reading comprehension lesson. There were laminated short stories mostly fantasies that the students would read and then I would ask the students questions at the end of the story to check for their understandings. Before the students would read the stories I would go over a few vocabulary words with them, which they would later see in the stories. Then some of the questions at the end of the story asked what the words meant again. I think that going over the definitions of the words prior to reading the stories was very helpful for the students, because they knew what the words meant when they saw them in the stories. Most of them were then able to tell me the definitions of the words at the end of the stories. These are the only times that I can recall observing vocabulary in the classroom. I hope that I will have more opportunities to explore vocabulary lessons as the semester comes to a close!
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