Assignment 4

I found most of the methods and strategies for increasing student's vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency in this week's readings to be interesting and helpful. For increasing vocabulary, I like the ideas of using writing exercises to build vocabulary (active and generative processing), the yes-no-why activity, the fill-in-the-blanks task, the completion activity (ex. "I was very persistent when..."), the conversation game, and the method of building background knowledge about words (ex. "A persistent person is someone who..."). I also appreciate that the authors emphasize finding vocabulary words that are useful across the content areas that do not have to relate thematically. In terms of comprehension and fluency, I like the ideas of using reading material that is interesting to students, expanding on prior knowledge before reading (ex. brainstorming about a topic/theme), visualization techniques, directed reading and thinking (the 3 questions that go along with this strategy are great), and think-alouds.

In my own classroom, I have used the strategy of building background knowledge and completion activities for vocabulary. I've also asked students to use vocabulary words to write their own sentences, which would be part of active/generative processing. I often use the reciprocal teaching method in my language arts lessons - we are currently engaged in a unit on the novel "Ender's Game" and we are constantly predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing parts of the story. I look forward to trying the directed reading and thinking and the think-aloud strategies to go along with the reciprocal teaching approach. To promote visualization, I've asked students to look through magazines and newspapers, tear out pictures that make them think of what we've been reading/studying, and paste the pictures on construction paper. The students keep these collages in their working folders as a tool to help them remember what we're reading/studying, if necessary.

My only concern about the strategies outlined in the chapters is that I'd like to use some of them in whole-group instruction, but my students are at extremely varying levels. For instance, I'd love to conduct the vocabulary conversation game as a whole group, but I have some students at a 1st grade reading level while others are at a 9th grade reading level. I suppose I could try using various words at different levels. I just have concerns about making the game too easy for some and too hard for others.