Teaching Vocabulary

Chapter 7

As much as I think reading is extremely important, you can’t read without knowing words, right?  The problem is vocabulary is hard to learn.  I know I struggled when I was a young reader with vocabulary and everybody said to me, the more you read the better your vocabulary will get.  Well, who wants to read if you don’t know what you are reading.  This truly is what has always set me off of reading.  Now I know vocabulary quite well but I still don’t enjoy reading too much because of the past.  I had one teacher that worked with me and did some of these exercises mentioned in this chapter to build my vocab up.  As a future teacher, I can see myself working with vocab a little bit more than other teachers because I know how I felt as a student.  By the way I don’t mean writing down the vocab list and writing definitions, that to me doesn’t teach anything, just busy work.  The very first strategy I think is great.  Before even getting into the reading, having students put how much they know these new words so as a teacher you know what to work on.  It also lets them see what they will be encountering that could be challenging.  Synonyms are a simple tool to teach more complex words.  I personally still do this myself, using simpler words to help define a word I have trouble with.  I also really liked the categorization activity.  It can be used as a good visual after words to help see associations of the words.  Under the study system, I wish somebody had taught me TOAST.  These seems like a great study tool that would really help to learn and understand the vocab words.  Imaging is a great tool, this helps to actually see the word in your head.  Lastly, I love the ideas of the different games with vocab, trying to make learning them fun and not seem such a task.