My summer reading included Marilee Sprenger's latest book, Teaching the Critical Vocabulary of the Common Core. She has put the time and effort into discerning the critical verbs and nouns at each grade level, according to the CCSS.
These academic vocabulary terms are essential for students to thoroughly own
- to understand them even
under stressful testing situations.
For example, one of the verbs at fourth grade is "interpret." It is one thing for a student to be able to parrot a definition to you, but another to truly understand what to do when they see a test item that says "Interpret this graph."
Spurred to action by Sprenger's book, I now have these words on my desk, right where I do my lesson planning. I stare at them every day, and hope to become so in tune with them, that I harmoniously add them into instruction at every opportunity. You can download them here.
Always looking for a visual, tactile way to engage students with vocabulary, I tried something new today. One of the classes I co-teach is using a mountain climbing theme this year, so today we started our hike up
Spurred to action by Sprenger's book, I now have these words on my desk, right where I do my lesson planning. I stare at them every day, and hope to become so in tune with them, that I harmoniously add them into instruction at every opportunity. You can download them here.
Always looking for a visual, tactile way to engage students with vocabulary, I tried something new today. One of the classes I co-teach is using a mountain climbing theme this year, so today we started our hike up
Mt. Vo-CORE-bulary. The critical verb that applied to today's lesson was "interpret." Students discussed the meaning of the word, practiced applying the word, and made flags to add to their mountain as they begin their climb to the top. We will continue to add other CORE academic terms as we move toward our peak. (We used sticky labels and toothpicks.The front side of the flag has the term, the back side has synonyms for the term.They can easily flip the flag around to refresh their understanding.)
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