Podcast and Blog

vocabulary

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Vocabulary Instruction Made Easy

In  a previous post about vocabulary, I discussed how we can choose great Tier 2 words and suggested a couple of ways that we might teach them. You can read that post here.

This week, I’d like to unpack a little more from the absolutely fantastic book, ‘Bringing Words to Life’ and share more about how we can make it all happen in our classrooms.

May be an image of text that says 'SECOND EDITION Ower450,000mPrint! Over 450,000 in Print! Bringing Words toLife Instruction Robust Vocabulary IsabelL Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan'

The first thing to know is that there are three phases to vocabulary instruction.

  • Introducing the words
  • Working with the words
  • Keeping the word…

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Choosing the right words for Tier 2 Vocabulary Instruction

In last week’s post I shared with you some key insights from my recent conversations with Margaret McKeown and Pamela Snow.  These amazing women very generously gave their time to help all of us better understand what it takes to teach vocabulary and language well.  Some of the key messages from these conversations involved the fact that you can’t teach all the words and that there are no set ‘word lists’ to teach from.  There have been some academic words lists compiled as guidance around this,…

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Vocab Tips from the Experts

You may have heard of my Facebook group, On the Science of Reading Bus.  This group explores one of 8 Key Actions of evidence-based reading instruction over a 5 week period and has a focus on learning, sharing and taking action. The current Key Action we are working through is ‘Explicitly teach vocabulary and background knowledge.’

To help give teachers a better understanding of the key actions I interview respected experts and share these interviews in the Facebook group. I recently had the …

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