Tips and Ideas

Building Vocabulary

Looking Up Unknown Words

From Leslie Clauss [Travis County, TX]
To have her students learn unfamiliar word pronunciations and meanings on their own, Leslie encourages her Read Naturally ME students to enter their unfamiliar words from the cold timing step into a Franklin Speller so that they can hear the word and look up its meaning. In addition, she has the students use the Franklin Spellers to self-correct their misspellings in the retells. Similar vocabulary features are built in to Read Naturally SE and Read Live.

Although a dictionary would not provide an auditory pronunciation for the student, students could use dictionaries instead of Franklin Spellers to find an unfamiliar word's meaning.

Performing a “Word Search” Before Reading

From Donni Stickney [Mathews County, VA]
To help students pinpoint words they may find difficult, have the students skim through the text to find and circle unfamiliar words before reading the story. After the teacher helps the students understand the unknown words, the students can read the passage much more fluently and successfully.

Using a Webbing Activity with Read Naturally

Jackie Lester [Cottage Grove, OR]
Use a webbing activity with Read Naturally. Before reading the story, students write what they already know about the topic. Next they write a question about the topic that they hope the story will answer. The students record all of this information on a webbing page that they keep in their notebooks.

Jackie's students also keep a vocabulary page in their notebooks. After reading the story for the first time, the student records unknown words on the vocabulary page. Each day, Jackie randomly chooses two words from among the students' notebooks. She discusses the chosen words with the entire group. The group discusses the definition, synonyms, antonyms, multiple meanings, related words, prefixes and suffixes. Following the discussion, each student writes a definition and a sentence using each word on their vocabulary page.

Have Students Include the Key Words in Their Retells

Barbara Reed, [Hayward, CA]
Ask students to use the key words from the story in their retells to help them remember the new words and their meanings.