4 Ways to Enhance Your Vocabulary Instruction

Hey, there happy Monday and welcome back to another episode. So today we are going to talk about vocabulary and things that we can do to help students expand their vocabularies.

And if you have been listening to the show for a while, then you might remember back in May, I shared an episode that talked about five easy steps that you can take for effective vocabulary instruction. It was episode number 192. If you have not listened to it, or if you forgot those five steps, go back and give that episode a listen.

It really walks you through a good process for introducing new vocabulary words to your students. And explicit vocabulary instruction is definitely something that we want to do. We want to be intentional about introducing our students to new vocabulary words, especially those words that they might see in a text or are related to science or social studies content they are learning.

But we don’t want our vocabulary instruction to just be consumed with introducing new words to our students. And that is simply because we just don’t have enough time in our instructional day or instructional week to introduce our students to enough words to sufficiently expand their vocabularies.

And if you’ve read the book, Shifting the Balance: Six Ways to Bring the Science of Reading Into the Upper Elementary Classroom by Katie Egan Cunningham, Jan Burkins, and Kari Yates, then you might remember this statistic that they shared, I thought it was really interesting.

But they said that most students will encounter more than 2 million written words in a year, which I thought was a crazy amount. And then they say that if 1 out of 30 of the words they read is unfamiliar, then they would encounter almost 70,000 new words, which is so many new words. But they go on to explain that if we only explicitly teach eight to 10 vocabulary words per week, during the school year, then we’re only going to be teaching our students 360 new words max.

So really, that leaves our students with quite a gap between the unfamiliar words that they might be exposed to, and the new words that we could possibly teach them. So to help them expand their vocabularies, in addition to explicitly teaching some vocabulary words, we also want to focus on other vocabulary concepts that are going to help students expand their vocabularies.

So I’ve got four things that you want to focus on in your classroom that are going to help your students expand their vocabularies. And all of these things that I’m about to share are really strategies and things that we love to support teachers with inside the Stellar Literacy Collective. We have a variety of resources that really make it easy for teachers to put these things into practice in their classroom.

So if you’re thinking that you need to focus a little bit more on vocabulary next year, but you also don’t want to spend the time planning or looking for resources or creating effective vocabulary resources, then let me invite you to join us inside the membershi. Doors are going to open on July 15, for this next school year. And if you want to learn more about the membership and get some extra information, you can add your name to the waitlist at stellarteacher.com/waitlist.

So the first thing that I want you to focus on, that is gonna really help their students expand their vocabularies is to teach morphological awareness. And that simply means that we want to teach our students to be aware of morphemes. And a morpheme is a single unit of meaning. So things like prefixes, suffixes, and Greek and Latin roots. Those are all morphemes.

And we want to teach those to our students because this means then that students have the tools that will help them look inside the word to figure out the meaning. When we focus on building morphological awareness, then students are going to become aware of word parts. And ultimately, it’s like they understand the building blocks that make up a word.

You know, if they have knowledge of the meaning and the spelling of a common prefix when they see a word that has that prefix, then they already have some word knowledge that they can bring to that word to help them figure out the meaning of it. And ultimately, teaching word parts is really effective. Up to 75% of words in the English language contain Greek or Latin roots.

So when students have a strong understanding of Greek and Latin roots, it is going to make it easier for them to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word, because more than likely, it’s going to have a root or an affix that they are going to know.

So how can you focus on morphological awareness in your classroom? So what you want to do is you want to make sure that you are explicitly teaching the morphemes. So spend time teaching students about the common prefixes, common suffixes and common roots. So use part of your Word Study block to introduce individual morphemes.

And we have some really great lessons in the membership that will help you do this. And it’s a very similar process to when you’re introducing a morpheme in the same way that you would introduce an actual vocabulary word. But you would introduce the word part, give it a student friendly definition, provide examples of words that have that word part. So words that have a specific prefix or suffix or root, give students practice building words that have that word part, use it in sentences, so students can see context.

So ultimately, we want to make sure we explicitly teach the individual morphemes. But we also want to give students practice an opportunity to explore words with morphemes. So this might mean that we’re doing some more hands on type of activities.

So maybe you’re doing some word sorts, where students are creating words and building words with different morphemes. Maybe you’re doing a Word Ladder, where students are doing different, you know, they’re given clues, and then they have to change a word part, to make a new word, maybe you’re doing a Word of the Week activity where students are given a word of the week, and then they do a specific activity with it every single day. So a variety of things that get students to really explore the morphemes.

But then we also want to make sure that students understand I think this is one of the most important things to think about when we’re considering word study instruction, is that we don’t just want students to understand the morphemes within the context of word study practice, but we want them to bring it into their reading experience. So we want to make sure that we are highlighting words in the text that we’re reading, that have morphemes that we’ve studied or morphemes that our students might know.

So this means you will see a word in a text, you would point out the morphemes in that word, you would identify the morphemes, you would identify the meaning of all the morphemes in that and then use the knowledge of the morphemes to figure out the meaning of that specific word. So making sure students really understand that the stuff that we practice in these word study lessons, and when we’re explicitly teaching morphemes, and practicing it that can be brought into our reading. And we can use that when we see a word that is unfamiliar to us. So that’s the first thing we want to focus on.

The next thing we want to do is we want to make sure that we are teaching our students about the five types of context clues. And when students are using context clues, they are using clues around the word. So morphological clues require students to use clues within the word. But context clues are clues around the word that can help students figure out the meaning of an unknown word.

And I always I sort of chuckle when I think about context clues because when I first started teaching, I didn’t really understand that there were different types of context clues. So I would just tell my students, you know, look for clues, like around the word use the context clues, and they would look at me with this, like confused look at like, what clues should we be looking for. And I eventually learned that there are specific types of clues that we can look for.

So if you didn’t know, there are five different types of context clues. And I actually did a podcast episode on this. If you want to learn more about the specific context clues, I’m gonna go through them briefly here. But if you want to learn more, you can go listen to episode number 41.

So one thing that you can use to remember the different types of context clues is the acronym IDEAS. And that stands for inferences, definition, examples, antonyms, and synonyms. And those are the five types of context clues.

So an inference means that the meaning is not to given so you have to use some sort of text clue. So an example sentence might be even on vacation, Ricardo will find a way to watch the baseball game, he is a devoted fan and we’ll watch games no matter where he is. So devoted would be the word students are trying to figure out, and they would have to make some inference, so they have to use some general clues to help them figure it out.

The next clue is a definition. This means that the meaning of the word is actually given to you in the sentence, and this actually happens relatively frequently in text. So an example would be Ricardo might be the Cub’s most devoted fan. He is committed and loyal to cheering for his favorite team every time they play. So that second sentence tells us devoted means committed and loyal, it actually gives us the definition.

The next type of context clue is an example. And an example is where an example of the word is in the sentence or nearby sentences. So giving again a specific example of what that looks like. So an example sentence would be, Ricardo has been a devoted Cubs fan since he was little. He has never missed a home game and has cheered for the Cubs even when they are on a losing streak. So that sentence, he has never missed a home game and is cheered for the Cubs fan. That is an example of what it means to be devoted.

The next one is an antonym. And that means that the clue is going to be a word with opposite meaning is used in the sentences or nearby sentences to help them figure out the meaning. And so this could be unlike Max, a disloyal fair weather fan, Ricardo is devoted and cheers for the Cubs no matter if they win or lose. So the opposite of devoted is disloyal fair weather fan. And so we know then that the meaning of devoted is the opposite of that.

So then the last one is a synonym. And this means that words with similar meanings are used in or near the sentence. So an example would be, Ricardo is such a devoted, dedicated and faithful Chicago Cubs fan, he never misses a game. So we see synonyms are dedicated and faithful.

So we can teach these clue types to our students, and help them understand that they can look for these types of clues if they’re, you know, struggling to figure out the meaning of a word. So we can intentionally modeles to our students during a read aloud or really anytime we’re working with students, we can talk about these clues during small group. You know, during our read aloud when students are reading independently.

We ultimately want our students to regularly see us looking for clues and naming the clue types, because that’s going to help them just become more automatic paying attention to these types of clues and recognizing that these are clues that exist within sentences to help them figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words.

So the next concept I want you to think about teaching when it comes to vocabulary is making sure that we are addressing shades of meaning. And shades of meaning really help us identify the subtle differences between words. And it’s a great concept to teach students because it can help them expand their vocabularies, it helps them improve their reading comprehension, and it also helps them use more precise words in their writing.

And that is because when students understand shades of meaning, they recognize that words like glad, happy and ecstatic, all have similar meanings, but they have slightly different degrees of intensity.

So for example, you might say something like, I’m glad it’s Friday. You probably though wouldn’t use the word glad in a sentence like she was glad she won a free trip to Disney. Using glad in that sentence wouldn’t sufficiently communicate the emotion. So that sentence, you’d be more likely to say she was ecstatic, she won a free trip to Disney. So while glad and ecstatic have similar meanings, the degree of intensity is different.

And when students can understand that it’s really going to help them understand not only the meaning of words, but when to use specific words in context. So shades of meaning can be really helpful just for students to have a broader vocabulary and understand, you know when to use words and what words specifically mean within certain contexts.

So a few things that you can do to teach the shades of meaning. I think the first one is to recognize that this is a concept we want to teach. And then be aware when new vocabulary words you are introducing could possibly have shades of meaning. So really looking for opportunities when you can bring this up into your conversation. So usually adjectives and adverbs and other descriptive words are really going to give you the best opportunity to present shades of meaning to your students.

So when you do introduce a new word that has a shades of meaning, you want to introduce all of the other words as well. So for example, maybe you are introducing the word frigid to your students, and you’re going to explicitly teach that word to them, you might also then introduce them to the words cold, chilly, cool and freezing at the same time.

And ultimately, depending on the words, you might want to introduce your students to the definition and sentences that go along with those words. So that way they really understand the various shades of meaning. I feel like in this example, students probably have a good understanding of what cold, chilly, cool and freezing already mean. So you might not have to go really in depth with those specific words.

But we want to really give students the opportunity to categorize the words according to intensity. So you can have them listed on sticky notes or note cards, and we want students to list them from the least intense to most intense. So with the example that I gave, students might sort them by cool chilly, cold, frigid and then freezing.

And ultimately, you know, you want to have a conversation about why our students sorting these words in the way that they did and see if the rest of the class agrees. And sometimes, you know, sometimes there’s going to be an obvious order to sorting them, we know that cool is obviously going to be less intense than freezing. But cool and chilly, those might, I don’t know if those maybe that’s a little bit more of a gray area, and there might not necessarily be a right answer.

And I think it’s important to recognize that the important thing is not having the right answer. The important thing is that students really understand what these specific words mean and the context in which they would be appropriately used.

So a good follow up would be then, is to give students scenarios and ask them which word from the shades of meaning spectrum would they want to use in that sentence? So for example, you would ask your students, what word would you use to describe the temperature on a fall morning? So maybe they would say it usually feels chilly, depending on the state that you live in I guess.

Maybe you would ask your students what temperature Do you want your ice cream cone? Maybe they would say frigid or cold. And you know, what temperature do you want the water in the pool in July? Cool. So giving students different scenarios to see if they can figure out the intensity of the word that would make the most sense.

And by focusing on shades of meaning, it really helps students develop a strong understanding for synonyms, and related words, which ultimately is just going to give them more word knowledge that they can use when reading. So it’s like instead of introducing students to just one word, during your vocabulary lesson, students get to learn five words instead.

So then, the last concept that you want to be intentional about teaching is multiple meaning words. And as students vocabularies expand, it’s important for them to recognize that some words can be spelled and pronounced exactly the same, but they’re going to have multiple meanings.

For example, let’s look at the word ring, spelled r i n g. This could be a noun, that means a circular band worn on your finger, like your wedding ring. But another example of a noun is the sound. A ring can describe the sound made by a bell or a phone. A ring can also be a circle of people or things, which isn’t another example of a noun, like a ring of spectators. But a ring can also be a verb, it can mean to make a sound like the bell was ringing, or your phone was ringing. But ring can also be a part of an adjective when we’re talking about a ring neck dove.

So we want students to be aware that some words can have more than one meaning. And when you are teaching or focusing on multiple meaning words, there’s a few things that you can do to really help your students develop their understanding of the various meanings of these words.

I think, one, let them know that this word is a multiple meaning word, and then give them the definitions, you know, and if you look up, the word ring, there’s a lot more examples than the ones I included here. But, you know, give them the definitions for two or three examples of the different meanings that the word has.

And in addition to the definitions, I think it’s also helpful for students to recognize the part of speech because that’s really going to be the thing that helps them understand the specific definition used in the sentences. So they want to understand the definition of ring as a noun, they want to understand the definition of ring as a verb.

It can also be helpful to show them images of the different examples so that way, they can have an image in their head of what the word means. And then also using the multiple meaning words in various sentences so students can get context for what is this look like when the word is used as a noun or an adjective or a verb and so on.

So another activity that you can do then to help students solidify their understanding is to give them scenario sentences, and ask them what part of speech is being used in the sentence. So for example, let’s say you introduce your students to the word bark. So they would understand that a bark could be a noun, which talks about the outer covering of a tree. But a bark can also be a verb, which talks about the sound that a dog makes.

So you’d give them the sentences and ask them what type of bark is being used in the sentence? So the first one would be the dog barked loudly when the mailman approached the house, so is that bark, the noun or bark the verb? That one would be bark the verb. And then the next sentence would be, we collected pieces of bark from the old oak tree to use for our nature project. And in that case, bark is being used as a noun.

So having students recognize the type of word and the part of speech that is used for the multiple meaning words in the sentence can really just help them solidify their understanding of the multiple meaning words.

So in addition to explicitly teaching vocabulary words, we also want to make sure that our students are learning other vocabulary related concepts that are ultimately going to help them expand their vocabularies at a faster rate. So the things we talked about in this episode are teaching morphological awareness, teaching the five types of context clues, teaching the shades of meaning and then teaching multiple meaning words.

And remember, if you are looking for resources to support you with your vocabulary instruction, then we would love to have you join us inside the Stellar Literacy Collective when doors open up on the 15th. One of the things that we are so excited for is we are adding brand new whole group lessons for third, fourth and fifth grade. And one aspect of these lessons is a vocabulary element.

So the resources that we are creating already have built in vocabulary focus. And all of these concepts that I shared in this episode are covered in the various vocabulary lessons that we’re putting together for the year. So if that sounds like something that would be helpful for you, again, add your name to the waitlist stellarteacher.com/waitlist so that way, you are aware when doors open.

And then don’t forget to tune in this Thursday, we are still in the middle of our science of reading summer series. This Thursday is going to be episode number five, and I’m going to be sharing ideas for how you can set up and organize your classroom library so that way it is aligned with the science of reading. Until then have a stellar week.