To be completely transparent, for more than half of my career, I was torn about exactly how to attack vocabulary- about providing instruction that would actually have an impact past my therapy room. I confess… I used many of the questionable methods that I discussed in Part 1 of this series. I often taught words in the moment; I taught strategies for context clues and words related to a book or theme. I felt confident about teaching Tier 1 words with my little ones, but academic vocabulary was a challenge for both me and my students.
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It works at every grade level from K through high school.
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When used in 24 classrooms – with one group using it and one not- the groups using it showed an average effect of 24 percentile points. That’s amazing!!
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It works best when the students using a description from their own lives- not when the teacher tells them one or they copy someone’s.
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Drawing the picture may be the most crucial part of the process but no parts should be skipped. Achievement was less when parts of the process were skipped.
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Games proved to be an important part and played a powerful part for recall.
I love this post! I love how you made the word "come to life" and how excited the students were. You are amazing!!!
Hi! I found this post while searching for ideas of how to encourage more use of tier 2 and academic vocabulary in our school. I'm an ELL teacher for grades 1-5 in an international school where almost all of our kids are ELL on various levels. If there's not much teacher or admin buy-in to the idea and importance of teaching vocabulary explicitly, how can I as one teacher (with 33 classrooms) encourage this and/or push-in to teach vocabulary lessons effectively? Appreciate any words of wisdom! Thank you!