You’ve got a ton on your teaching plate and hardly any time for a lunch break. Now here I am telling you that you should be teaching vocabulary daily.
Ok. Yeah right.
I hear you! It’s not easy to fit one more thing into your schedule. But this one thing is so important and I’m going to tell you why.
Teaching Vocabulary Daily Improves Fluency
The more words kids know, the more words they can read. They don’t have to frequently stop reading when they’re not sure what a word means.
And sometimes they don’t stop even IF they don’t know what a word means. Sometimes kids will read right on through and not stop. That isn’t reading fluently.
Reading fluently means reading the words correctly while making meaning of them. I may be able to read all of the words in a medical journal but if I don’t know what they mean I’m not reading like a fluent reader.
When you teach new words each day, you’re help kids develop their vocabulary which in turn helps their fluency.
Learning and Practicing Vocabulary Daily Improves Reading Comprehension.
When kids can understand most of the word meanings, they are able to better comprehend the text.
The meaning of the text is lost when there are too many words that a student doesn’t know.
This goes hand in hand with fluency. Both are needed to have successful readers that can understand what’s happening in a text.
Teaching vocabulary daily allows you to teach the strategies needed to tackle word meanings.
It’s great if kids know the meanings of most of the words they read. But there are times that they need to use a strategy to figure out what a word means.
Maybe they need to use the context of what’s happening in the text. Maybe they need to use word parts like prefixes. Or maybe they need to understand multiple meanings and figure out which one makes the most sense in certain texts.
Teaching vocabulary daily allows you to teach these strategies so that kids can be successful independently whether reading at school or at home.
You’ll See Higher Reading Test Scores
Now I know it’s not all about the test. Believe me. But it’s a reality. And it’s what most administration is looking at.
Reading comprehension is important for not only passages on a standardized test but also for the questions. Some of those questions are more puzzling than the answer they’re asking for.
There are also many vocabulary questions on most reading standardized tests. Kids need to have a good vocabulary foundation in order to be successful at answering them.
It Benefits Other Subject Areas
In math, they’ll be able to better understand word problems if you teach them math vocabulary. They’ll be able to better understand science and social studies content if you teach them those tier 3 words.
If you teach any other content area besides reading, teaching vocabulary daily is essential.
There are so many benefits to teaching vocabulary daily. You can try it out using my free vocabulary lesson plans that go with the book Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson.
