Academic Vocabulary Words Worth Learning

Introduction
As the new school year approaches feelings of anticipation and nervousness begin to set in. This will be the first year I will be teaching fifth grade and a literacy block. Teaching a new group of students each year is challenging because you have to understand and adapt to how your students learn very quickly. This year I get the opportunity to teach the group I had two years ago in third grade. I know most of the students in my class. I know what their struggles were, and I plan on using that to my advantage when planning my literacy block. This is a great group of hard working students, but many of them are struggling readers. Knowing this about my students, I plan on using guided reading groups, vocabulary instruction,
In reading and in the content areas my students are bound to come across words they do not know the definition of. In the article, Selecting Academic Vocabulary Words Worth Learning, it says academic vocabulary practice should be an essential part to a literacy lesson because vocabulary and comprehension go hand and hand (Townsend & Kierman, 2015). Knowing vocabulary and comprehension are linked, I want to give my students the opportunity to learn strategies to figure out new words and content related words in the texts and books they will be reading. In the article, Teaching Vocabulary, it says vocabulary drills are very isolated and you want to give the students the opportunities to see the vocabulary in authentic texts (Diamond & Gutlohn, 2006). Diamond and Gutlohn (2006) says having the students go beyond defining a word causes them to think about word parts and helps connect words to each
My guided reading groups will have my students grouped based on the text they can read with accuracy. I plan on using running records to group my students for guided reading. The purpose of my groups are to allow my students to expand on the strategies they are leaning within a text they can comprehend. During my guided reading groups I will be working with a select group while the other students will be engaged in meaningful tasks that promote learning and literacy (Fountas & Pinnell, 2012). During my guided reading groups I also want to give my students opportunities with text that are on the “edge of their learning” where it pushes my students thinking with the support of the teacher (Fountas & Pinnell, 2012). Jones and Proctor (2015) says text selection is also important because some text lends its self to more meaning discussions (Jones & Proctor 2015). Guided reading lets me really work with my students on a level that they can participate