Blog 5

Chapter 3 addresses the concept of vocabulary in the classroom. The book offers lots of strategies to successfully expand your student's vocabulary. A few that stood out to me were, word walls, studying the roots of a word through structural word analysis, and  studying the subtle differences in the meanings of words. All of these strategies would be easy to incorporate, and students would be able to understands vocabulary words on a deeper level. The book discusses using role-play to act out the vocabulary words. Associating physical gestures with a particular word will help the students remember the word on multiple levels. I know this through personal experience. My high school Spanish teacher created a hand motion to go along with each of our vocabulary words for the week. To this day, I can still remember a majority of the words, along with corresponding hand motion. 

 The part of the chapter I found to be most helpful, was the discussion of using vocabulary in math. In my opinion math vocabulary is not only extremely boring, it is also difficult for my to retain. I often get confused between factors, products, etc. Chapter 3 explains teaching mathematics vocabulary through the system of introduce, define, discuss, and apply. This system allows the students to have multiple forms of exposure to the word. By the time they have reached the "apply" stage, they should feel fairly confident in their knowledge of the particular word. The book also talks about using math journals to study vocabulary. I think that journals are an excellent strategy to use. They engage the student into connecting the term with life outside of the classroom, allowing them to retain the information on a deeper level. 

Overall, I found this chapter to every helpful. I introduced me to many different ideas to teach vocabulary in the classroom. A question that comes to mind is how do I create vocabulary words that are appropriate for all the different levels of learners in my classroom? Also, how much instructional time should be spent on vocabulary?