Tag: Vocabulary

One of my goals for 2020 is to read 50 books throughout the year. Yesterday I finished book #3, The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. This is the book that inspired the movie by the same name. It tells the story of Michael Oher, a young, black kid growing up in poverty. He is taken in by a white, Evangelical family when he enters a new high school. The combination of a stable family and football helps transform his life.

Oher grows up, prior to meeting the Tuohy family, not knowing his birthday and unable to read or write.

There are so many lessons about education and life in this book. It explores the effects poverty and how your zip code at birth has an enormous impact on your life and opportunities.

At one point, Oher is at a bookstore with two members of his new family. The mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy, and her son Sean have a conversation about reading. Sean points to the book Where the Wild Things Are and mentions how his mom used to read it to him as a child. “To which Michael replied, in the most detached tone, ‘I’ve never had anyone read me a book.'”

This story breaks my heart for so many reasons. The obvious one is that there is a child who has reached high school and has never had a book read to him. What is more alarming is that this happens in communities all over the country. There might be students sitting in your classroom who would not have a book read to them if not for the read aloud that occurs in school.

Another take away from this book is how important vocabulary is to reading comprehension. The first page of this book is loaded with Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary.

From the snap of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five. One Mississippi: The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It's what most people know as a "flea-flicker," but the Redskins call it a "throw back special." Two Mississippi: Theisman searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming straight at him. It's a running down - the start of the second quarter, first and 10 at midfield, with the score tied 7-7 - and the New York Giants' linebacker has been so completely suckered by the fake that he's deep in the Redskins' backfield.

Imagine what a reader needs to know to fully understand the very first page of the book. (This is only half of the first paragraph.) The third word of the book has a double meaning in the sentence – snap a football (ball moves from center to quarterback) and snap (break) a bone.

Then the reader tackles (pun intended) the idea of “One Mississippi…” “Two Mississippi…” Some readers will be able to understand that this is a way to ensure you are counting in seconds. Lewis, who is a remarkable author, uses this language to convey the idea of time ticking. However, this is also a football reference. When children are playing touch football, a defender usually cannot tackle the quarterback until they count out loud – One Mississippi… Two Mississippi… Three Mississippi…

There’s also terminology specific to the game of football – quarterback, running back, linebacker, first and 10, flea-flicker, and backfield. All this vocabulary made me think about some of the text we give our students. If a non-football fan was asked to read this passage, how would they do? They’d probably struggle. Would they need some support and scaffolding? Most likely. Could the class launch right into reading this page and hope everybody was successful? No.

This was a wonderful book that made me think about so many important topics: poverty, education, vocabulary, and more. I read this book because I heard a best-selling author say it might be the best narrative nonfiction book every written. I’m not sure if that is the case, but it’s got to be up there.

Today I was reading a text with my students and wanted to preview some of the vocabulary. I decided to use a graphic organizer with a “Prediction” and a “It Means…” column. Students would make predictions about the meaning of each word, and then we would talk about the actual meaning.

Before students started, we had a conversation about the importance of trying to make your best guess based on what is known about the word, or its parts, but that it was okay for your prediction to be incorrect. We also talked about strategies that would help predict what the word might mean – word parts, hearing the word used before, etc.

After the three minutes I gave students to make predictions, we whipped around the room and listened to a few predictions for each word. We talked about how students got the prediction and then shared the meaning of the word. Students added the meaning to their “It Means…” column. What was really valuable was the conversation that happened after students made the prediction.

One of the words was disassemble. A student said his prediction was, “take apart.” I asked him if he’d ever seen this word before and he said no. He said, “I knew if you assemble something you put it together – like ‘some assembly required’ on commercials. So, I guessed the dis- meant to do the opposite, so I guessed that dis… assemble meant the opposite, take apart.” He even added the pause between the dis- and assemble. I couldn’t have asked for a better response, and part of me wanted to let him finish teaching the lesson.

This was a very simple way to preview the vocabulary. Students were engaged because they wanted to see if their predictions were right, and the rich conversation made the time spent extremely valuable.

As I said, these words were preselected, but choosing which words to teach is critical. We can’t teach all the word which might be unknown to students. So, how do we know which words to teach? Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan broke vocabulary words into a 3-tier system:

Tier One – Words used everyday which require little instruction (building, car, parking lot)
Tier Two – Words are high frequency academic language used across domains (formulate, analyze, specify)
Tier Three – Words specific to a field of study (denominator, insulator, legislature)

The biggest impact comes from teaching the Tier Two words because they are used across content areas, but we also need to teach the Tier Three words within units of study. Teaching prefixes and suffixes also has an enormous impact because knowing one prefix or suffix can unlock so many words. For example, our discussion of dis- meaning “not” or “opposite of” lead to a conversation about other words with the same prefix – disapprove, dissatisfied, etc.

After you’ve chosen the best words to teach, you need to determine the best way to teach them. One strategy in Robert Marzano’s Vocabulary for the Common Core is Six-Step Process for Vocabulary Instruction:

Provide a description, explanation, or example of the new term.
Ask students to restate the description, explanation, or example in their own words.
Ask students to construct a picture, symbol, or graphic representing the term or phrase.
Engage students in activities that help them add to their knowledge of the terms in their vocabulary notebooks.
Periodically ask students to discuss the terms with one another.
Involve students in games that allow them to play with terms.

There are tons of resources out there with ideas for vocabulary activities. What are some of the strategies that you use in your classroom?