Description
Cunningham (education, Wake Forest U.) draws on 30-plus years of experience in various elementary grades and in remedial reading to create an accessible text for elementary school teachers. The author is concerned about the lack of vocabulary instruction for all students in elementary schools, but particularly for the increasing number of students who are not native English speakers and children who live in economic poverty which results in a widening knowledge gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" in the U.S. For the text, the author has gathered the most effective and "doable" vocabulary instructional activities, and provides examples and suggestions of how teachers can include these activities each day as they carry out instruction across the curriculum. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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To Pat Cunningham vocabulary isn't just a predictor for comprehension it is a reminder of how much meaning vocabulary matters and how complex it is to teach children meanings for words. In many ways, things are better in our schools for children who we used to call “underprivileged” and “disadvantaged.” Every state now has public kindergarten and pre K is available for our most needy children. The Internet and other technologies make “bringing words to life” a richer and more do-able goal. However, we still have many children coming to school with impoverished vocabularies. Many of these children come from underpriviledged families and many do not come with much English. Drawing on her experience as a classroom teacher, researcher, scholar, author, and co-founder of the Four-Blocks Literacy Framework Pat Cunningham offers elementary teachers a practical model and friendly strategies for helping ALL students develop their vocabularies. Guiding teachers to use all available resources to build rich meaning vocabularies, she helps to ensure every student's success in school and beyond. There is no way to overstate the importance of meaning vocabulary to comprehension. The size of a child's vocabulary is one of the best predictors of how well he or she will comprehend while listening or reading. Simply stated, what really matters is building bigger vocabulary to make all students better readers. Features: Practical strategies teachers can use to build meaning vocabulary throughout the school day. Separate chapters for building vocabulary during math, science, social studies and the arts and physical education.
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