I read a blog titled Techniques for Teaching Vocabulary by Gaetan Pappalando, that discussed the best way to go about teaching vocabulary in the classroom. The big thing that Pappalando talks about is that you do not force vocabulary, but you use it in every day conversations. He talks about several different ways to improve vocabulary such as by reading aloud daily, creating their own individualized vocabulary lists, and by using it in fun ways throughout the school day.
A great way to increase student’s vocabulary is to read to your student’s daily. By reading to your students as much as possible the students get to hear how words are used in everyday life. After reading sentences with vocabulary words in it, stop and talk about why that word was chosen for that sentence and if the sentence would mean the same thing or be as descriptive if you used a different word in its place.
Another way to teach vocabulary is to form reading groups based on abilities and allow them to meet with you, the teacher, and create their own vocabulary list to work on for the week. By creating their own lists, they each are challenging their vocabulary levels. This eliminates your students from getting bored because they know what some words mean while others have never heard them.
The last thing that Pappalando discussed was different things you can do with the curriculum that can engage the student’s to participate in the classroom. He talks about how poetry is a great way to teach elementary students vocabulary, because it isn’t really long, introduces rhyming words, and allows them to use context clues to figure out word meaning. Using poetry is also fun to young students to read! Morning message can also be used to work on phonics skills and improve sentence comprehension. First, read the question or statement to the students and then allow them to repeat it with you showing them the proper way to say words and how to sound them out properly based on their spelling. You can then end the morning message by talking about what is meant by the message and how to best answer it.
The big statement that really stood out to me from this blog was, “You learn vocabulary by listening, learning books, and having conversations!” This statement is so powerful and so true in the fact that their background knowledge influences their vocabulary dramatically. If they’ve never heard the word, than how are they supposed to know what it means or how to use it in a sentence correctly.
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/teaching-vocabulary-elementary-gaetan-pappalardo
