I never experienced any fun activities with vocabulary as a child. The only thing that I remember doing is using the dictionary/glossary to look up a million words that I would never remember the definition for. This is the strategy that most of my teachers chose to use when wanting us to learn any kind of vocabulary. I feel like this was an awful choice and vow to never make my students look up 25 words and copy the definitions of them in their notes. Since we started tutoring our children at OG, I have learned that there are several strategies that are much more engaging and will be much more likely to hold the students' attention and make them actually feel like they can learn the words.
Vocabulary is key for children to be successful readers, and I feel that it is very important for students to be engaged in vocabulary lessons. A strategy that really worked for my student was a strategy that allowed us to use clue words or pictures to represent each word. Instead of having to learn a whole sentence long definition, she could just remember one word or even remember just a picture. I feel like she has definitely improved in her vocabulary since we started tutoring. I took my knowledge of different strategies and applied them to her, and I feel like it has been a huge success. She is more confident when using new vocabulary words and it shows when she is reading. I love watching her improve and love that I was the one that was able to help her!
I think that dictionaries and thesaurus' are very important for children to be familiar with, but I don't think that it should be the only way for them to learn vocabulary. I was a good reader as a child, but hated learning vocabulary simply because my teachers chose the most boring ways to present the material. I feel like if they would have used some more engaging strategies, I wouldn't have hated it so much. I don't want to give my students any reason to say any of these things about me!
