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The Time and Place for Damning the Lexile
Give middle schoolers choice in not just reading, but in vocabulary list building as well.
I recently ran across a quote in a "This I Believe" list on Beers' blog supporting the self-selected reading model, and it reminded me to question our collective faith in Lexile and other measures of readability. The resistance to self-selected reading goes hand in hand with the resistance to giving students the power to be in charge of their own vocabulary enrichment. In both cases, the resistance is a result of the faulty assumption that if a teacher is not in charge of the learning, then it must not be taking place.
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Dept. of Word Lists
A Current-Events Mini Lesson: Trans-Pacific Trade
Teach Trans-Pacific Trade Using 10-Word Vocabulary List
Social studies teachers: For a current-events mini lesson on the historic Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement, check out our 10-word Vocabulary List, drawn from five key sentences in the New York Times article announcing the agreement.
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Teachers at WorkA column about teaching
Collaborative List Creation: Now That's an Idea!
An eighth grade teacher shakes up her Monday morning vocab routine with Vocabulary.com
Eighth grade teacher Erin Vanek decided to shake up her Monday morning vocabulary routine with Vocabulary.com, and her experiment with collaborative list creation paid off. Read on to discover how you can use collaborative list creation to ground your students' introduction to words as they are used, and not as they are defined.
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Tips & Tricks
To Create a Culture of Word Learning, Get School Rivalries Going
Competition within a district fires up game play for all.
Last school year, we noted an interesting trend among the most successful schools playing in our annual Vocabulary Bowl: they were operating in an environment of district-wide play.
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Blog Excerpts
Originality is Overrated
Interrupting the tired look-up-and-write-a-sentence instruction loop.
We have all seen this tired loop of "instruction": distribute word list, have students look up words, ask students to use the words in original sentences. While encouraging usage is never a bad idea, it's not realistic to expect students to pivot from definition to usage without guidance. We suggest ditching (or at least delaying) the idea of originality and instead asking students to model their sentences on usage examples written by those people who are especially skilled with using words: professional writers.
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Blog Excerpts
Debunking the Great Reading Myth
Head back to school armed with the word-learning research.
One of the most persistent myths about word acquisition is that students don't need to be taught words; they just need to read more and their vocabularies will magically expand. This theory — which I like to call "learning words by osmosis" — doesn't hold much promise for your average or struggling reader. While it may hold true for a select group of students who are strong, avid readers possessing a curiosity about words, most students don't learn words by simply encountering them in reading.
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Tasty MorselsGood stuff from Vocabulary.com
One Teacher's Brilliant Summer Reading Hack
Reinventing a tired summer reading assignment while boosting student vocab
When middle school literature teacher Kathy Zimbaldi first pitched the idea of Vocabulary.com to her principal at St. Vincent de Paul School in Houston, TX, she was pretty sure the tool would bring meaningful word learning to the literature curriculum. What she didn't realize? It would also help her hack Summer Reading...and land her students a David-beats-Goliath feel good monthly leaderboard win.
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