Bringing Words to Life

My school had a book I had been meaning to check out for some time in the library. So over Spring Break I checked it out and read it. I loved it. So I thought I might share some of the things I learned. You can find it online pretty cheap.

Some of you most likely have heard of it or have seen principles from it. In fact just last week, Melissa at F is for First Grade just posted something on her blog that followed similar principles. I hope to follow in her footsteps and use these principles to inspire vocabulary instruction in my classroom.

Beck, McKeown, and Kugan encourage teachers to focus on a couple of key words in a trade book read aloud each week. They encourage an emphasis on associations, descriptions, sentence stems, and questions instead of definitions. I hope to work more on this next year. I'll be honest. It is a great idea. But I'm not sure starting it a month before school ends is a great idea. There is always next year!