I felt highly encouraged about teaching while reading both of these articles. Both articles explained the importance of reading words, early phonics teaching, and the ability to summarize. I was reading about the importance of children being exposed to words in books. The article said that children learn the meanings of words and expand their vocabulary through interaction with books because books have to be purposeful with their word choice. They cannot rely on facial expressions to help children grasp a meaning of a word so they use context clues to help them expand and understand vocabulary.
I was very impressed with the ten word activity. Children display difficulty when they must summarize, yet this activity forced them to pick out only ten of the most meaningful words to summarize the entire article. Then to further the activity, they said to encourage children to use the word in sentences, think of synonyms, and to think of different forms of the same word. I thought this would be extremely helpful in providing developmentally appropriate material. Children who are still struggling with writing, could be placed in the group that just thinks of synonyms whereas better writers could be placed in the sentence writing group. This activity reminded me of something Monica had said in class. She said that often her students had trouble with summaries so she would have them describe the article with one word and then elaborate on why they decided on it. This activity would be perfect for helping to develop vocabulary and summarization skills.
To help reinforce new vocabulary words, a teacher can put letter stickers on blocks and encourage the children to connect new words. This teaches them to spell the word, provides a visual, and allows them to manipulate the materials to create new words and expand vocabulary.
What other activities could teachers use to reinforce new vocabulary words and deepen understanding?
Haley,
ReplyDeleteI like the idea for the activity you mentioned in your blog post. My teacher in third grade used to make us write the new vocabulary word and then draw a picture. I love art so this really reinforced new words and helped me remember and understand the meanings. We would staple all of the pictures in to a little book each week and use them to study for our spelling tests. Great idea!
I loved the ten words activity. It really showed me how one lesson on summarization can be used in so many ways. I liked how this lesson started with critical thinking and then stretched that thinking even further.
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