Building Students' Vocabulary
Reading Children's Literature Aloud Builds Vocabulary
Build your students' vocabulary through reading aloud children's literature. Listen for interesting words, discuss their meanings, and place them on word walls.
The benefits of reading aloud to children are endless. Exposing students to high quality children’s literature provides a teacher with many opportunities for teaching skills, strategies, and fostering a love of reading. But engaging students through the rich language of text is also building their vocabulary.
The National Reading Panel summary conducted in 2002 by the International Reading Association [Newark, DE] identifies incidental learning as an effective way of building students vocabulary. It states that, “Most vocabulary is learned through reading or listening to others read.” The Panel also identified that repeated exposure of words was effective for building vocabulary.
Our Fancy Word Wall
Normally in the primary grades word walls consist of sight word vocabulary or special content area words. However, every classroom should be complete with a fancy word wall. This word wall should consist of words that the teacher and students have come across or found in their read alouds.
Begin your school year and introduction to your fancy word wall with Jane O’Connor’s wonderful gem of a book, Fancy Nancy [2005]. Nancy is a little girl who wants everyone and everything around her to be fancy. Throughout the book, she uses fancy words. For example, "posh is a fancy word for fancy."
After reading this book, tell your students that they are going to be on the lookout for fancy words. And when they find or hear one, you will add it to your Fancy Words word wall. Begin this word wall with words from Fancy Nancy. Also tell your students that you want them to try to be like Fancy Nancy and try using some fancy words.
Poetry and Listening Centers
Ogden Nash’s poem The Adventures of Isabel [2008] has recently been transformed into a beautiful picture book. This stellar book captures the attention of readers through beautiful watercolor paintings and the hilariously rhyming poetry of the fearless Isabel encountering some not so pleasant creatures. Nash’s word choice is very interesting in that it will spark a great discussion of what these words mean. However, the context they are written in will easily help children to infer their meanings.
This book comes with a CD of Ogden Nash reading his poem which can be placed in a listening center along with the book. Some of his interesting vocabulary such as ravenous, rage, and horrid could be placed on a mini word wall near the listening center. Students will quickly learn these words and meanings through this exhilarating book!
Word Wall of Character Traits
At the beginning of the year send home a list of character traits and a request to your student’s parents asking them to choose three traits that would best describe their child. Have them provide examples of how they show that trait. Then in school, have your students create a self portrait and write the three traits around their portrait.
Character traits are great words for students to learn to expand their vocabulary. Making it personally about them will help create a deeper meaning. As the year goes on and you continue to read books, compare the main character’s traits with some of your students' traits. You may want to have a specific place that you can add more character traits as you encounter them.
A great book for extending this idea is Cookies: Bite-Sized Life Lessons [HarperCollins, 2006] by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. This book has a character trait on each page and defines the trait with an example related to baking, eating, sharing, or not sharing cookies. For example, “Patient means waiting and waiting for the cookies to be done.” This would be a great book to help add to your character traits word wall. You could also have your students create a class book similar to this. Instead of baking cookies, choose a topic like going to school, or playing on the playground. Then have each student choose a character trait and write an example of what it means related to that topic.
If you are feeling unsure of how much vocabulary instruction you are accomplishing in your class, simply rest easy and continue reading aloud to your students. Have discussions with your students about word meanings and draw attention to them by creating special word walls in your classroom. Reading aloud is proven to be an effective way of building vocabulary. Try some of these books and instantly start building your students’ Vo-book-u-lary!
