Winter Blog.... 2/22

I have been able to see several different styles of how teachers teach vocab. In my dyad experience (3^rd grade) the teacher had posters all over the room. It would have the word and the definition written next to it. To help support their learning she had a half sheet of the most common words and the proper spelling. To help assist in their learning, in the morning when they came in the students would have to look up two words, write the definition (this always ended up being the first one), page number, the words that were on the top of both pages, and 2 synonyms. This was a good way to get the students exposed to how use a dictionary, also what we can learn from a dictionary. Looking back I am not sure that it really made that much of an impact on the students. I noticed that many of them did it as fast as they could or just took the first definition they found. This means they did not see words could have more than one meaning, or really look at what it said.

            In my main placement (kindergarten) the teacher likes to take a different approach. While we have not used the dictionary (nor do I think we will use it), we still teach new words to the students. When teaching the students a new word we tell them the kid friendly version, but also the “big college” word. They really seem to like that we do this; it makes them feel important and cool that they are leaning the words that I am learning in college. One thing my teacher has learned from working in kindergarten for so long is that when you put the words with movement and actions, the students have a better success rate for remembering the words. We have a word wall for the sight words, and have posters with words and definitions that we bring out when we want to remember what the definitions are.