Thursday, January 29, 2015
I observed a teacher during my clinicals teaching the students about health. The teacher gives a word a day that the students need to figure out what it means. The students write what they think the word means and then they discussed it. Then the teacher would tell them what the word means and then they would have to write a sentence with the word in it used in the right way. I felt that this was a great way to empower students about vocabulary, and you could use this exercise in every discipline. In the Harmon, Wood, and Hedrick reading it says that we need to prepare students with certain approaches that enable them to become independent word learners. By doing this, this will allow the students to gain knowledge of vocabulary and then build upon words that they learn.
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I also like what you learned in your clinicals through having the students determine what the word means then discuss the definition as a class. Vocabulary is an important skill for all people to learn so they can communicate more effectively. In becoming a teacher in English it will be a continual topic that will need to be covered so students will understand what is being read in class. Vocabulary as important as it is can be difficult to teach because it is one of those things learned well through writing then reading the definition. In other words it is one of those things that is boring. We as teachers need to be able to motivate through being creative in our teaching methods.
ReplyDeleteHi Laura,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your posting. Like you, I think this teacher met the principles in the Harmon, Wood, and Hedrick reading, such as asking students to predict word meanings rather than just telling them to look it up in the dictionary. In addition to these activities, it's also important to give students more elaborated chances to express their understandings as well. For instance, if the word was "communicable disease," they could write an announcement to be posted in a recreation center (real or fictional) about what communicable disease is and how to prevent it. Writing those more extended texts helps students remember words better, as opposed to single sentences. Although single sentences can be a good place to start! Thanks again for your posting.
I love that you learned this during your clinical experience. I believe there are many learning opportunities during clinical experiences. I agree that this technique will help students build upon their knowledge as they learn to use vocabulary in writing.
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