Blog 6

In this chapter the author discusses vocabulary and how to teach it to students effectively. To me this chapter seemed geared toward an English class rather than a History class. I think that there is a difference between teaching vocabulary words and the terms that you use in history. I think though that many of these points that the author makes can be easily adapted to a history classroom. For example I thought that graphic organizer called Context Plus could be easily used in my class. Some of the sections may have to be changed but for the most part it would be a good tool. The students would be able to say what they already know about the word and what they associated with it providing a better understanding. There was also a chart in the book titled “What Do We Know From Research” which provided me with some other ideas. For example one thing in the chart was discussion leads to vocabulary learning which I believe is essential for understanding. I have mentioned that I felt this was chapter could be more easily used in an English class so I thought I would share my ideas on how we learned for vocabulary. My senior year my teacher (who also happened to be my 7^th grade Science teacher and 8^th grade English teacher) used something new in the classroom for vocabulary that I had never heard of. It was his first year in the high school and he was looking for ways to improve our vocabulary. He used Flocabulary which is pretty much vocabulary in a rap song. These songs are filled with numerous vocabulary words and they are very catchy. Most of the words you can even figure out the meaning based on the context used in the song. We would start off every class by singing the song that contained the vocabulary words for the week. I can honestly say I learned more vocabulary that year than any other year. To this day I still use the words, and I even remember the songs. Needless to say, he found a very entertaining way to teach us our vocabulary words. He even created a lesson where we had to come up with our song using our words that week. We could either use a tune that we already knew or create our own. It was something fun and different that really helped the class to learn. This is the link for more information on Flocabulary http://flocabulary.com/.