The Word Conscious Classroom The Word Conscious Classroom

How does teaching parts of speech enhance word consciousness and ones ability to solve analogies? Well, the more one knows about words, the more word consciousness he or she will gain. This means that a close look at English grammar needs to happen within a word conscious classroom. The teachingRead More

For the majority of my teaching career, I have been teaching vocabulary using the specific word learning technique. According to the Vocabulary Handbook, this technique falls under intentional vocabulary teaching. Hence, many of the passages from our anthologies and basal readers utilize specific word learning as an intentional instructional approach toRead More

Teaching students to pay attention to text is what I’ve been focusing a lot of my energy on lately. It has been my experience that students have been over-taught how to decode words, and under-taught how to figure out what the author is doing with those words and with theRead More

A few years ago, I went to a professional development workshop on using Analogies for teaching gifted learners. The presenter provided a strategy entitled R.O.P.E. which stands for Relationships, Order of words, Part of speech, and Exactness. I was fascinated by this strategy and I started using it with my students.Read More

As I set up my classroom for word study, I consulted the Growing Words: Word Part Instruction Guide.  Before I introduced the Word Part of the Week, I wanted to introduce Latin and Greek Roots to my students in a creative way.  I started looking online for materials that would setRead More

In a previous post, I wrote about encouraging students to look inside of words for spelling patterns. In this week’s post, I am directing students to look inside of words again, but this time we are focusing on smaller words, words that are considered Anglo-Saxon base words. I then explainRead More