Familiarity with Greek and Latin roots, as well as prefixes and suffixes, can help students understand the meaning of new words. This adapted article includes many of the most common examples.
Sharing wordless books is a terrific way to build important literacy skills, including listening skills, vocabulary, comprehension and an increased awareness of how stories are structured.
Children are full of questions about the world around them, and summer is a perfect time to tap into your child’s interests. Here are some ways to start a journey of discovery together.
The framework provided in this article for viewing students’ science writing offers teachers the opportunity to assess and support scientific language acquisition.
Learn some of the ways that pre-kindergarten through elementary school teachers can enhance the vocabulary development of young children. It focuses on teaching words from texts that are read aloud to children and presents activities that help young children make sense of new words.
Most words in a child’s vocabulary come from everyday encounters with language. Children pick up language from books, media, and conversations with the people in their lives. Here are some ways you can increase your child’s vocabulary and background knowledge, and strengthen the foundation for their reading success.
Consider some excellent lesson models for teaching vocabulary, explaining idioms, fostering word consciousness, instruction for English Language Learners, and mnemonic strategies.
Newspapers expand the curriculum with an unlimited amount of information to use as background for learning activities. Discover new ways to use the newspaper in your language arts studies, with these activities from the Newspaper Association of America.
This list was created to help teachers know which spelling words should be taught to kids in grades 1–5. The list contains 850 words that account for 80 percent of the words children use in their writing — the ones they need to be able to spell correctly.
To thrive in today’s English Language Arts classroom, students need rapid recall of words they know and the ability to capture, learn and remember new terms.
By actively and independently reading text, students simultaneously can build their word identification, fluency, vocabulary, and text-dependent comprehension skills. Learn about three key steps teachers can take to help students experience success with independent active reading.
Sharing lots of different kinds, or genres, of books with your child exposes him to different words, different kinds of images, and whole new worlds. This tip sheet suggests some genres to try with your young reader that complement ‘traditional’ fiction. Some are suggestions for read alouds, while others may be ones your child can read on his own.
How can we supplement the limited time available for vocabulary instruction while motivating students to attend to the words they are learning? As a part of an academic word vocabulary intervention, the authors challenged sixth-grade students to find their words in the world around them.
One of the most misunderstood topics in reading instruction involves the extent to which children should be encouraged to rely on context cues in reading.
Science learning involves lots of new vocabulary words. Focusing on root words, prefixes and suffixes can help your child learn new science words more quickly and become a word detective!
The teacher’s use of language provides an important model for children’s vocabulary development. By modeling the use of sophisticated words, teachers can promote students’ vocabulary growth and word consciousness. In this article, the research support for this approach is explained, suggestions are provided for how teachers might accomplish this goal, and examples are shared from teachers who have done it successfully.
Cognates are words in two languages that share a similar meaning, spelling, and pronunciation. For Spanish-speaking ELLs, cognates are an obvious bridge to the English language.
When a student is trying to decipher the meaning of a new word, it’s often useful to look at what comes before and after that word. Learn more about the six common types of context clues, how to use them in the classroom and the role of embedded supports in digital text.
A recent research study shows that using multimedia video in conjunction with traditional read aloud methods may improve the vocabulary growth of English language learners. An example of how to implement multimedia during classroom read-alouds is described.
A veteran teacher describes how she used visualization, Google images, video, and Skype to build background knowledge and enrich her students’ classroom read aloud of a fiction book about ospreys.
The best story times are very interactive: You are talking about and reading the story, your child is talking, and there is conversation taking place between the two of you — what educators call “dialogic” reading.
An English language learner may not have an advanced English vocabulary, but with the right kind of curriculum and instruction, teachers may be surprised at the knowledge ELLs can gain. Science lends itself well to developing ELL students’ language and content knowledge because there are so many opportunities for hands-on learning and observation.
Children who comprehend the most from their reading are those who know a lot about words. They are familiar with word prefixes, suffixes, word roots, and multiple meanings of words. Families can help develop word knowledge through simple conversations focused on words.
Children with vocabulary weaknesses are especially vulnerable to difficulties with reading comprehension from the middle elementary grades onward. Vocabulary weaknesses may affect school achievement in many areas beyond reading, including written expression, mathematics, and performance in content subjects such as social studies and science.
Reading aloud is a common practice in primary classrooms and is viewed as an important vehicle for vocabulary development. Read alouds are complex instructional interactions in which teachers choose texts, identify words for instruction, and select the appropriate strategies to facilitate word learning. This study explored the complexities by examining the read aloud practices of four primary teachers through observations and interviews.
