RPI Day Six - Vocabulary

This was my favourite day so far. (Don't know if I'm allowed to say this lol).

The foundation of reading starts with having a rich vocabulary.

Firstly, we were given a maintenance check to see when/how we are teaching vocabulary in our classrooms, I only was able to say I did 2/5 of these vocabulary routines in my classroom. We spoke about getting our learners reading for enjoyment, this is something I have implemented in my classroom, giving students a certain time of the week where they're able to read a text of their choice.

'Vocabulary knowledge accounts for 80% of the variance in reading comprehension, and is the strongest predictor of reading comprehension.'

Teachers all around the world teach vocabulary by getting students to look up the definition and write it down, how can we be more creative and get our learners more engaged in learning new words?

I enjoyed learning about the different Tiers of words. Tier 1 being high frequency words, tier 2 being more difficult words that learners will need to unpack throughout the text and tier 3 being specific topic focussed vocabulary that you wouldn't be able to use outside of this topic.  When planning for reading, we need to find Tier 2 words that our learners are going to be able use in their every day lives.

We were given exemplars of vocabulary tasks that we can use in our classroom.  After having a go at doing these, we then made our own activities.  This was a rich task and gave me a really good idea of how I wanted to go about doing follow up tasks rich of vocabulary. By doing this learners are able to continue learning the vocabulary we were doing during our guided reading lessons.

I look forward to using this in my reading programme! Another awesome day!