 Vocabulary in its most basic sense is knowing and understanding the meaning of words when we listen, when we read and when we write. Academic words are words that kids need to be introduced to explicitly in multiple ways, in multiple subject areas, and they need to have many, many experiences with these words because they won't necessarily use them in regular day-to-day conversation. The research shows that students who are behind or have a language delay or are English language learners especially need the development of their oral language so that they can transfer that knowledge into their reading and writing, and vocabulary acquisition is also directly tied to reading comprehension and basic understanding of materials. I have found it very important to introduce new vocabulary words and give the students many opportunities to use them. In social studies we were focusing on rural and urban communities, so we looked at many pictures of each type of community. Kids sorted those pictures on a t-chart, we watched videos, and then when we were doing a read-aloud or guided reading book I could ask the students what type of setting that story was taking place in, and they could identify whether it was rural or urban, and now we just throw those words out in daily conversation and the kids can use and understand them in many different contexts. And identify 2D shapes. Love, Ms. F. Identify. Who can remember what identify means? I explicitly teach vocabulary and have the expectation that students will use it. We show pictures of things that are coming up that we're going to talk about. We stop during stories, we've used some of our reciprocal teaching strategies to clarify words, and then it is on them with support that they use that vocabulary. If we're talking about a plant, we're talking about the stem, the leaves, the roots. We're not talking about the thing that holds it up and what goes in the ground. And they feel very safe in that. The more opportunities they have to use the vocabulary, and no one tells them they shouldn't know those words, or those are big words for you. We learn them, we teach them, we practice them, and it over time just is in their regular, their vocabulary. Prior to the pilot project, I didn't necessarily spend a lot of my instructional time direct teaching vocabulary to children, and since the pilot project that has completely changed, it introduced me to the concepts of tiered vocabulary words, tier one words being those that are basic sight words, ones that we just need to know are used all the time. Tier three words are those that are more technical in nature, used more in a specific context, and we don't come across them in day-to-day use normally. And then the tier two words are those that are, I like to call them juicy words, the words that kids need a lot of experience with, but they may not be familiar with the bigger words and they need so much experience with those types of words. So I've learned through reciprocal teaching how to draw out those tier two words and focus on them, taking those sort of rabbit trail teachable moments that may seem to go off on a tangent and dealing with them in a really intentional and productive and focused way, helping the children to understand words that they didn't know before. It's kind of enlightened me as a teacher in the sense all of a sudden I'm realizing, okay, maybe it's the simple words that we think the kids are getting that they aren't getting. So it's built vocabulary twofold in the more simple words and in words that, you know, for sure are beyond their level of comprehension. And the best part is that they're then, we focus on that vocabulary word, we're then able to take it to our writing and they've got context to bring it back into. So it's like, oh, remember in that story there was that special word for angry and they can quickly say, oh yeah, that was the story where they use the word cross and then they start to use it in their own writing. So it's been pretty amazing and incredible to watch them do that. It's changed my practice in that for my word wall, I will be having the clarifier word wall with pictures and words, the words that we come across in stories that we read together and just posting them with a picture so that the students have a really easy access point to remember what those words are and that they're meaningful. And I've just seen that they're just so much more willing to ask about words that they don't know. I have a tendency just in life to use big words and I do that in my classroom even though they're grade one. Multiple times, what does multiple mean again? Yeah, does it over and over and over again. The other day we were reading a story and one of the words was barricade and they asked me what barricade meant and I had another student who actually knew what it was and he was the one who described the word to his classmate and then the whole group was like, oh yeah, I know what that is. So it was just really exciting to see that peer to peer teaching that was happening in addition to just me giving them the meanings of words. So it's just really encouraged them to ask and that it's okay to ask and I've seen the words that they're using and their vocabulary base grow exponentially because many of my students when they come in they just have very limited background knowledge. They don't have experience with a lot of things in life that we would take for granted and so it's just been fundamentally important to build that with the pictures and with talking about it and the discussions we've had and it's been remarkable with the growth that they've made.