Word Families
There are many reasons I like to use word families to teach reading. As students become familiar seeing word family patterns they know that when they see that ‘chunk’ of letters together it will always make the same sound; whether it is found at the beginning, middle, or end of a word.
Word families are very successfully used with ELL students to discuss new or unfamiliar vocabulary words. If a student knows the word in their native language we can use that background knowledge in discussions about the English word. This is also a time for us to discover that many words can have multiple-meanings. A word may sound and be spelled the same way, but have more than one meaning (ring on your finger, ring of a bell, ring around a tub).
Word families are also a successful learning tool because they lend themselves to being able to use poetry as part of our lessons. Specifically, poems teach rhyming, cadence, extend our vocabulary, increase our memory skills, and increase our knowledge of culture and traditions.
Word families are very successfully used with ELL students to discuss new or unfamiliar vocabulary words. If a student knows the word in their native language we can use that background knowledge in discussions about the English word. This is also a time for us to discover that many words can have multiple-meanings. A word may sound and be spelled the same way, but have more than one meaning (ring on your finger, ring of a bell, ring around a tub).
Word families are also a successful learning tool because they lend themselves to being able to use poetry as part of our lessons. Specifically, poems teach rhyming, cadence, extend our vocabulary, increase our memory skills, and increase our knowledge of culture and traditions.
Question of the Day
A creative way that we develop our expressive and receptive language skills is by answering the 'Question of the Day'. This activity is easy to sneak in during a lesson or just as the students are entering the room. A question will be posed, and students respond by moving their name, or writing a short response under the appropriate column. The question relates to an aspect of what we are learning in our lesson, so helps us develop our vocabulary usage. We also learn to use tally marks when counting up our answers. Finally, we develop well thought our comparative sentences to explain our data. A question may be, "How may teeth have you lost?" After we have collected our data, we will create an answer summarizing our findings. We may state, "Everyone has lost at least two teeth, and one classmate has lost seven"
Common Core Mathematics Vocabulary Terms
firstaddition, subtraction, sum, difference, group, counting on, making ten, doubles, combinations, equal sign, true, false, unknown, digits, two-digit number, greater than sign, less than sign, mental math, unit, centimeter, inch, hours, half hour, minutes, digital, clock, trapezoid, half-circle, quarter-circle, cube, right rectangular prism, cone, cylinder, half, fourth, quarter, fraction
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secondaddition facts, hundreds, skip count, expanded form, standards form, number names, value, ruler, yardstick, meterstick, measuring tape, foot, yard, meter, number line, a.m., p.m., coin, dollar, quarter, half dollar, cents, line plot, picture graph, bar graph, angles, faces, quadrilaterals, pentagon, hexagon, rows, columns, thirds, halves
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What else can you tell me?
There are four language domains: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Students progress through each of these domains at their own pace. It is difficult to rush language development. Students feel success in our programs because they can show their learning in many ways. A student may show their understanding of a story by displaying picture cards of the story in the correct sequence. A student may identify a pattern in beginning word sounds after hearing a rhyme. A student may apply a math skill by completing a graph using details learned in an activity. A student may excel in a game of concentration or memory using character cards from a story. Remember to be patient. The overriding conclusion is that oral proficiency in a language takes three to five years to develop and academic English proficiency can take four to seven years. Keep the learning fun. A noted language theorist in second language acquisition, Steven Krashen, specifies that "language cannot be acquired if emotional states such as anxiety, boredom or disinterest block language input to the brain...most educators... would agree that positive emotional states and positive relationships facilitate language acquisition and language production or output".