Hi! I've been enjoying reading what you all do for vocabulary. It's an area that frustrates me, largely because as I understand the research, minute for minute, kids build at least as much vocabulary by doing free reading as they do by studying vocabulary lists and taking quizzes. This especially made sense to me after reading "Words, Words, Words" with y'all and getting a sense of how much time it takes to do focused, word-based vocabulary instruction effectively. So in my ideal world, I wouldn't be teaching vocabulary at all, and that time would be spent doing independent reading.
But I don't live in my ideal world, and so I do word-based vocabulary instruction. It makes students (and their parents) feel like I'm actually teaching vocabulary, even those who take it on faith that independent reading is really the way to go. They do generate their own lists. If they're going to be learning word lists, I'd rather every single kid had a list of 10 genuinely unfamiliar words, and I just don't see any other way to do that. I tell them that ideally, they will come up with a word list from our group novels and their independent reading books, but for those kids who complain that process breaks up their reading too much and frustrates them, or who just prefer pre-made lists, I provide links to on-line word lists which they can also use. They email me their lists with definitions and/or sample sentences, and I copy and paste them in to individualized quizzes, obviously omitting the definition part. In the (quite rare) instances of a kid who sends me a list where she clearly knows one or more of the words, or is merely duplicating her science/math vocabulary list, I just point that out to her and ask for new words in place. So grading these lists became essentially just a matter of did a given student do a list or not - which they all did - hence my wry comment on how vocabulary lists figured in my grading policy, or rather that they figured at all! Reading through what you all are doing, I'm thinking that providing some sort of multi-modal self-study template for them to use would make sense, whether that's how I require lists to be submitted in the future, or I just make it available to them. That would still be imperfect, but better than in the past. Thanks again for your ideas! Take care, Bill Ivey Stoneleigh-Burnham School _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
