Building Vocabulary

How many words do you know?
I was stumped by this question when I first read it in Cunningham and Allington's Classrooms That Work. For what seems like such a simple question, it requires a lot of thought and is actually incredibly difficult to answer. For starters, I couldn't think of an estimate of all of the words I knew, then as stated in the text, what does it mean to 'know' a word. There are thousands of words that I have heard or seen once or twice, but I don't know the spelling or what they mean. I may know something about a word but not its entirety, so do I know those words? These questions are just some of the thoughts that enter which make it difficult to determine the size of someone's vocabulary.

One useful strategy Classrooms That Works describes that is easy and accessible to use for all elementary teachers is "Picture Walks". This strategy helps develops children's vocabulary by going through a picture book before reading the story, stopping on a couple of pages and identifying some new vocabulary words as shown in the images. This will grab the students' attention when they read through the book and will help them remember these new words.

There are several fun games and activities that can be used to promote broadening children's vocabulary. One of these strategies, as talked about in Blachowitz and Fisher's Vocabulary Lessons is a vocabulary "word wall". The idea is to have students add new words to the wall when they came across them in conversations, books, magazines, etc. The teacher can make this into a class contest by awarding the students points for adding a new word, talking about where they saw or heard it, and using the word in a sentence. This activity gives students a positive way to look for new words and learn the context and fully understand them rather than memorizing the definition and spelling.

Vocabulary is a huge part of successful reading, because in order to understand difficult reading levels you must understand the challenging words that are in the text. It is important to increase children's vocabulary in elementary school so that the knowledge translates into their writing and speaking abilities.