We have had a busy, but fun summer getting ready for the upcoming school year. Time is really flying by! Over the next few posts, we want to share a few new things we are going to be doing this year.
To start off the summer, we hung up our teacher hats and became students again, when we took the class Own Your Words: Effective Vocabulary Instruction through Advancement Courses online. The focus of this class was to implement robust vocabulary lessons and assessments to help students internalize their own academic vocabulary and then use it in their own communications.
As Jim Rohn states, "Vocabulary enables us to interpret and to express. If you have a limited vocabulary, you will also have a limited vision and a limited future." These words reminded us of the monumental responsibility that we have to each and everyone of our students. Our ultimate goal, as third-grade teachers, is to elevate our students' literacy skills to a level in which they can begin to understand the world around them, as well as communicate effectively with those in the world around them. To reach our goal, we thought, "Would it be a good idea to step up our game when teaching vocabulary?"
The course answered this question with a resounding yes.We learned we needed to tweak some things this year and make small changes that we believe will have a huge impact on our students' vocabulary knowledge. We also realized that our instruction was really only for short term learning or understanding of the words. It needs to be more robust for students to retain these words on a long term basis. However, it did validate the activities we used with our students.
Many of the activities that we will share with you over the next few blogs are based on the research and ideas from Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan in their book, Bringing Words to Life. At times we will even throw in some activities, thoughts, and articles from the well respected Robert Marzano.
To kick off our vocabulary instruction for the year, we want to get our students excited about words and make them aware of the amazing words that can be found all around them, within the four walls of our classroom, and in the world around them. We want them to view words as magical keys that allow them to have an unlimited vision and future. Below, we are sharing with you our kick-off lesson to this year's vocabulary instruction.
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| Kick Off Lesson |
More lessons, assessments, and games inspired by Isabel L. Beck, et al., will be coming your way soon.
Kim and Anne
