RPI - Day 6

Todays session was all around building students vocabulary and how we can support this within our classroom teaching practice.  Dorothy kind of kicked us off with a powerful reminder of how students who come into school with a deficit in language vocabulary are already behind the 8 ball.  She trumpeted the notion that in addition to quality teaching we can teach students to use digital tools to close this gap in what vocabulary knowledge students have and what they need.

Connecting this to my own thinking - I have been noticing an inability for students to think and discuss things in depth which is also due to a lack or limited in their own vocabulary - this has been somthing I have been struggling with for a few of my students.  How can we extend and improve their ability to think beyond 'it was fun', and 'because I liked it'  when writing, and to be able to really challenge thinking when thinking about comprehension.   In particular these students read well but their explainations seem to be constantly at a surface level and as a result their reading comprehension is kind of stunted to a surface level of thinking, and although there are strategies we are putting into place in the classroom this still seems to be not hitting the mark.

I know I already do lots with regards to Vocabulary but needing to do more or something differently is also important.  



Todays session discussed the 5 principals of Rubust Vocabulary Instruction 

• Direct Explaination
• Thought provoking connections
• Playful use of words
• Interactive engagement
• Follow-up

We also looked at the different levels of words that students encounter.

• Tier 1 being everyday words that students mostly hear in conversations.
• Tier 2 being more words that are more commonly found in writing, important to enhance comprehension.
• Tier 3 being very explicit and often related to specific topics (low frequency words

Although this wasn't new learning refering to it within this tier framework was a new way of thinking about the words.  However again being reminded of the need to feed in 700+ words per year to our students makes the thinking about this all the more important.

Next steps

Word walls - or a MAGPIE wall - This again was not new but was a good and timely reminder to re-integrat this into classroom

Some good vocabulary activities to build students understanding of words so would be keen to trial some of these - the difficulty will be working out which one or ones.