Teaching Vocabulary with Routines

In our classrooms, we get so excited when the students really have broken the code. They're breaking the code. They're starting to read beautiful words and sentences and paragraphs, but then I realize, “Hmm, I don't think they're really getting to the deep understanding and I need to do more to build their knowledge of words and their meanings.” Maybe I bring in word learning strategies such as morphology and that cognate awareness, but actually I also need to be thinking about how the words work to make cohesive sentences and the functions of words and how they're related to other words. We call that syntax. That really matters for reading comprehension. And so it really is important to focus on the structure of the language, the structure of the sentences, the meaning, but I also want to help them visualize, right?

Make those mental pictures or maybe even draw them out. What does this mean to you? And can you summarize it? Because then what I'm doing is making a connection for that. This is how I interpret it. This is what I picture. I think it was Plato that says, "If I cannot picture it, I cannot understand it. " And so that's so important. We know that those beautiful visuals and the demonstrations, that is so helpful to our students to really understand. So we've got to be very ... And I'd like to see that we're systematic about that, so that the students actually know what I'm going to do. "Oh, okay. I know what my teacher's going to do. As we look at words, my teacher's going to make sure I have all the sounds and I can read the words. My teacher's going to make sure I have the meanings. Oh, my teacher might help and we might do a demonstration. We might have a visual. We might turn and talk to our neighbor to explain it, right? Then we might come back and read some more, summarize what we're reading,” but that is really just teaching the students about what you're supposed to be thinking as you read.

“And oops, did I get stuck because I really didn't understand that word. I need to ask some questions about that. I need to explore that further.” And so it's really paying attention to not only that ability to read those words, read those words off the page, but really paying attention to the words, their meanings when they're put together with other words. How does that structure lend to comprehension? How do those sentences when we read sentence to sentence to sentence, what does that do for that entire reading?

And can I just summarize? I just read about the, I like to do kind of a three sentence summary. I just read about who or what and what happened because why. So just putting little routines in there can very much help our students to summarize, to get to the gist of what they're reading.

And don't assume just because you don't have that language comprehension piece that our students, "Oh, what's going on?" Well, they likely have that long language comprehension piece in their home language, but what can we do to build upon? Do they have the concept and do I understand that? Oh good, guess what? How beautiful. They already have the concept because they're showing me that they have that concept in their home language. They just need a new label to it, a new word to it.

Maybe what you can do is really look at that ability to frontload our students with the knowledge that they need, prepare that vocabulary, figure out what words they're going to be needing, and as they're reading, can they comprehend and there's some extra resources that could likely help you with that.