Article Reflection

Article Reflection: (5 step series) 5 Simple Steps for effective Vocabulary Instruction By: Kimberly Tyson In the article it goes over five steps to introduce vocabulary and to teach/instruct it in a way that will actually resonate with the students. The 5 steps can be compared to the drill and kill method often used with vocabulary terms, which is useful sometimes, but the lasting knowledge is not as well remembered. The first step, key characteristics of vocabulary instruction, deal with multiple exposures, frontloading key vocabulary, and nonlinguistic representations, which we do in class through the use of brain pops, pictures drawn during notes, and posters created in class about specific topics. Step two, is using those tier 3 words that are specific to our content with the mixture of tier 2 and tier 1 vocab. Step three, is a print rich environment where students have their work on the walls representing terms learned as well as posters or chances to write/read. Step four is building on vocabulary strategies or, to put in simple terms, routine of studying vocab. Step five is having digital tools to support the previous steps.
I have put these strategies to use in my class with a very good response from my students. Overall they seem to be able to manipulate the terms and then reuse them in the proper way, but also using the term outside of the context learned. I consider this very good because most of the time students will simply use the examples giving in class; which is more memorization than actual retention and comprehension. Below I show you how I used each step in class: Step 1: Exposing students to vocabulary in multiple ways such as: flash cards/posters created/stories/videos/diagrams Step 2: In notes and explanations I use terms like infer, identify, resolve, and other terms that can be used in other areas, but we partner them with tier 3 words that are specific to science. I have heard the students use words in multiple classes that we have