June 16th Reading

The readings for this week on vocabulary and read-alouds are beneficial to us as future teachers. Each article, and in the text as well, allowed me to gain further insight into these topics. I began by reading the Hart and Risley article and was intrigued by their study. I was aware, before doing the readings, that there is a gap between the amount of words children know based on their socioeconomic status; however I was shocked to to learn how drastic these numbers actually were. I immediately began thinking of ways to improve these numbers and after reading the other two articles and Chapter 6 from the textbook, I know feel that I have gained more knowledge on how to better the vocabulary experience for children.

In the Vocabulary Lessons article, Blachowicz and Fisher stated four practices that teachers should implement in their classroom in order to provide a comprehension approach to vocabulary development. They are: develop word awareness and love of words through word play, deliver explicit, rich instruction to develop important vocabulary, build strategies for independence, and engage students actively with a wide range of books. I have learned from this article the importance of creating environments that offer children proper resources and materials that enable them to play with words. Also when providing instruction of certain vocabulary activities it is important that a teacher select, teach, activate, and revisit; this is a modal that I plan to use in my future classroom. Inviting children to become independent readers is another strategy that I would like to implement in my classroom; the article stated one way this could be achieved was by instructing the children on how to properly use a dictionary. Child can only become independent readers in the classroom if they are provided with a wide range of reading activities, such as book clubs.

I also found the Lane and Allen article to be rather interesting. I like how Ms. Barker provided different classroom jobs to her students; I have seen this done in other classrooms, however I do feel that Ms. Barker took this concept a step further. I feel that it was beneficial that she began by using words that the children knew to name the various jobs, for example weather watcher. In order to expand their vocabulary the teacher challenged the children by replacing weather watcher with meteorologist. I think it is important to first learn basic concepts of words by practicing them and providing the children with repetition opportunities and then build on that knowledge. Ms. Riva did a similar concept to this with the work that she did with her class on adjectives. Both examples have inspired me to not just only teach the simple words when working on vocabulary with children.

The chapter in the text provides several examples of how to present effective vocabulary activities to a class. I think the section that described bringing objects from home is a simple way to prompt children to discuss with one another and expand their vocabulary. I also would like to incorporate teaching unfamiliar words from the teacher read-alouds into my classroom one day. It was also interesting how the text suggested to invite the children to locate their own words they think the class may not know from a book they read on their own; this is a great way to get each child involved in the learning process. The book also mentions how to display these words throughout the classroom. Ultimately each of these activities are important and should be incorporate into the classroom in order to expand children's vocabularies.