Wednesday, February 13, 2008
SO what do you do for a vocabulary deficiet. they are older (upper elementary), and communicate (sytax is fine) and seem like an normal kid (until you ask them to tell you what something means), They are missing the meaning behind the words they are exposed to a lot of the time. I have seen a lot of "antonyms and synonyms" objectives, but honestly how functional is that? Short of giving a vocabulary lesson on each word in the dictionary, what do I do to help her catch up? I feel like my sessions are inconsistent and disorganized (probably because they are). Does this make any sense, is there any help out there? This isn't quite as clear cut as the previous post (pun intended).
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3 comments:
Vocabulary is challenging, in that, there is so much to teach. I think that a functional way to approach thing to do is to get a hold of her teacher and obtain a list of 20 vocabulary words that she will be using in the classroom and expected to know. You can then teach a lesson off those words. Then like Dr. Culatta said find to way to relate it to some experience she has so that it sticks.
You could do a spider web (word web, whatever they are called) and talk about all aspects of the word meaning (definition, function, made of, associations, etc). You could creat word books and give her homework to find pictures that illustrate the target word. I remember doing that in school.
To document improvement, you do a pretest with the # of words and ask her to define them. Then do the same thing after going through your marvelous vocabulary lessons.
I don't know if that helps but maybe there are some ideas that you could use!!
wow, nice ideas karen. good luck marybeth!
I don't know if my students are the exception, but my vocabulary-deficient children also have grammar issues. My approach has been to attack vocabulary by working on tenses and expanding on concepts... but that might only be because after months of requesting the classroom vocab list, I got one for ESL students. If these kids are ESL, then how did they get on my caseload?! Otherwise, Karen has awesome advice (I don't know how you do it all, Karen. Family, work, preparing extravagant vocabulary lessons, and you still find time to party!).
P.S. Don't give the PPVT. I have had several kids pass the CASL and flunk that darn test. I often wonder if they really don't know the vocab or they're confused by the pictures.
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