12.03.2013

Vocabulary Development Resources

Students depend on a base of vocabulary to comprehend increasingly difficult content. And students must maintain a solid foundation of content vocabulary to communicate mathematically with others. Vocabulary is only learned through multiple exposures. Here are my top three resources for vocabulary development in the math classroom...

#1 

Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering (2010) have completed extensive research regarding a six-step process for learning and acquiring new vocabulary terms in their book, Building Academic Vocabulary: Teacher's Manual.
  • The teacher provides a description of the term.
  • Students restate the explanation in their own words.
  • Students draw a non-linguistic representation for the term.
  • Students participate in activities that help them add to their knowledge of the term.
  • Students discuss the term with one another in small groups.
  • Students play with the vocabulary term in games 

#2 

Ben Taylor incorporates cooperative learning and Kagan structures in his book, Vocabulary: Making It Memorable, to expose students to academic vocabulary in a variety of settings.

#3 

The Granite School District in Salt Lake City, Utah maintains a wealth of vocabulary building ideas for all grade levels and subject areas.


The MATH-7 team will investigate vocabulary building in their next Genius Hour on January 20.
Stay tuned for more details...

7 comments:

  1. If the students don't know the vocabulary, then understanding and learning will not take place. It needs to be a top priority in our planning.

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    1. I completely agree on both accounts. Do your current lessons adequately emphasize vocabulary? If not, how can we seamlessly capture time to integrate vocabulary development? This is a major endeavor that has the potential for HUGE impact! How can we best rally the troops to roll out classroom-ready options? Devote Genius Hour sessions to creating the infrastructure?

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  2. Yesterday we talked about creating a vocabluary list for Unit 5. I talked to Sarah briefly about maybe even starting a Vocab List for all previous units as well...maybe we could do this on a shared doc so we could make a working list of the definitions and then use the agreed definintions to make vocabulary games. Is this something you would like us to do on our own? Or do you have any suggestions?

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    1. The Excel spreadsheet titled "MATH7 Vocabulary" might be a great place to start. Perhaps adding a column titled "Unit" and classifying each term. There may be terms you want to add/delete or definitions you want to refine.

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    2. Once you have a set of terms for any unit (or all of them), I would be more than happy to kick in the manual labor of creating games, analogy slides, etc. Let me know what I can do to help.

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    3. Got it! It only took me about 10 minutes to figure it out. I obviously need more practice on this blogging thing. Thanks for your patience! :)

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  3. Numerous efforts are made to learn the vocabulary words, but all the efforts goes in vain when they learnt words are not retained in the memory for ever. So for retaining the words for a longer duration of time visit www.vocabmonk.com and unlock all the amazing features.

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