The 30 million word gap is something that I remember first learning at a Teach for America training 4 or 5 years ago. Even after 5 years of teaching and watching so many students struggle with an obvious vocabulary deficient, it's still hard to comprehend. 30 MILLION WORDS. And those are my kids who are suffering, and my kids who we aren't reaching.
As I'm sure I've mentioned before, this year my class has a high ELL population. Of my 19 students, 16 speak a language other than English at home. The word gap is wider and harder to close for them. In January, I tested a student on TRC. His fluency is amazing - he read every nonsense word on DIBELS with time to spare and can decode books we ask third graders to read. However, he couldn't pass a mid-first grade level on TRC because of two words - "greedy" and "lesson." Watching his confusion as he struggled to understand was so frustrating! If only I could ask in Spanish! If only I had taught him "greedy" when describing character traits instead of "brave" or "persistent."
Over the past few weeks, I've really enjoyed learning more about teaching vocabulary and trying to implement it in my classroom. My first attempt at a vocabulary square was pretty feeble, but it gave me a lot to learn from. For my second tiered lesson, I was much more intentional about the vocabulary I chose. Was it something that my kids could understand and access, or was it one of those "Tier 3" words that wasn't as essential to their understanding. It was actually pretty fun to watch my kids engage with new words and recognize them in other settings.
I'm excited to continue trying new ways to introduce vocabulary in my class. I have to keep thinking of it as small steps. It's not 29,999,995 more words to be exposed to, but five more words they've learned.
Hillary-
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your post. It's teachers like you who make a difference. You're not wallowing because your students are encountering challenges nor or are you making excuses for why your students may be further behind. You've taken ownership of your part in their education and development. I appreciate how you're introducing more vocabulary lessons into your classroom, and doing this through trial and error. I agree with you that you end up learning a lot more from failures than you do from success. It's wonderful that your students are starting to recognize the words they're learning about it new settings! And I especially appreciated your last statement of five more words they've learned rather than the number they need to catch up. Those five words make a huge difference.
Hilary,
ReplyDeleteI love your enthusiasm to try new and various ways to teach vocabulary. I think your outlook is great. It's important that we as teachers focus on the idea of what new words can introduce to them today or what words can I add to their vocabulary that they might hear and use but not necessarily understand. I think if we as educators listened to more of the conversations and words the kids were using we might be able to come up with some new words to teach them that they could then use in their writing and conversations.