My Routine

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Archive : 2006 : September : 11

My Routine
By whydoi

Okay, I have developed a routine for introducing and working with the words. It works becuase the kids are immersed in the words for the week. When I taught (last year) 35 kids I never had issues of management or boredom
when doing this. They enjoyed the work.
Here's what I do:

1. On the first day of the new story I give them the words.
2. I say the words. No one says anything.
3. I say the words a 2nd time. The students repeat them after me one at a time.
4. I ask them to go through and write down definitions for any word they already know.
5. We then go through the

words one at a time. I give them the definition (through various ways) and they write it down. Sometimes I just outright say "the word means _____". Sometimes I give them an audio or visual context for the word and we divine the meaning. If they already have a definition I ask them for that and we refine it as necessary. When I give the definitiion on the first day, I give them a simple one. We refine it as we go through the week.
6. Then we say the words once more.
7. The next day we do a word-association activity with each word. I ask them to think of a word that, for example, goes with "How your mom looked at you when you were talking during church" - sternly would be the correect choice.
8. Each day after that we do another word activity with some or all of the words (depending on the importance in the story and to their life).

As i said the kids don't have problems with this method. They learn the word. I challenge them to use the words in a sentence. That's always fun.

BTW, this routine and the other stuff I do is taken from a book called "Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction" by Isabel L. Beck
thanks