Unit 4: Article 2 Response

This article describes several strategies and activities teachers across all curriculums can use to teach vocabulary.  The article points out that students spend most of their time at school outside of English class, so that should not be the only place that they learn vocabulary.  Effective vocabulary instruction includes developing rich representations of word meanings and learning about how words work.  These approaches give support to understanding and using text ideas through vocabulary knowledge.  I really like the DASER format used by Mr. Pasley.  I think it would be a great way for students to keep the vocabulary organized and they could put this in a notebook to keep for future reference or to study by.  By having students find all of the parts of the DASER, students are learning many connections and associations to that specific vocabulary word.  It also looks like it would be easy to reproduce and modify.  I will definitely try this tool out next year!

This article really underlined the importance of vocabulary instruction in all content areas.  I like that there were specific examples of the activities and strategies, I always understand better when I can see it. I now realize that I put vocabulary instruction on the back burner when it should have been a priority.  I will definitely change this for the years to come.

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