After reading the article by Blachowicz and Fisher and Ch. 6 by Cunningham and Allington, I've learned that little time is spent in the classroom on vocabulary. Both readings also emphasized how there are many students who have a poor vocabulary and how it is a huge issue when it comes to literacy development. Blachowicz and Fisher had a great idea for vocabulary called the Word Wall. Students who ran into words they didn't know that were used in everyday life would write it on the word wall. It didn't take very much time away from other lessons and a lot of student learned new words incidentally. I thought it was an awesome idea to help students with vocabulary. Cunningham and Allington also had a very good suggestion pertaining to read-alouds. When teachers read out loud and they come across a word most students aren't familiar with, they take a second and ask the children what they think that word means. Modeling vocabulary words will help students more than anything. Blachowicz and Fisher also state that read-alouds are helpful. Much of vocabulary is learned indirectly. I also agree with the fact that both articles didn't really like the dictionary approach with learning new vocabulary. Personally, when I was younger, using the dictionary and writing definitions repeatedly helped me a lot but I knew a lot of my peers struggled with it. I don't think using a dictionary is the right approach when it comes to vocabulary.
I also remember using the dictionary approach to learning vocabulary. It was really big in my 5th grade classroom. I thought it was extremely boring and a lot of my classmates struggled with it as well. We were just instructed to go in alphabetical order, but if a child had trouble with their alphabet it would take them an extremely long amount of time and it was a frustrating task that made learning new vocabulary daunting.
ReplyDeleteI have observed some fun and engaging methods used in local classrooms just this semester. I watched as one of my placement teachers allowed her students to play a teacher made version of pictionary. The kids loved it and it allowed them to practice their vocabulary words. They only got credit if spelled correctly, but I found that this type of approach motivated the students to not only want to know how to spell a word, but truly understand it so they could be "good" at the game.
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