Finding Time for Productive Vocabulary Play
Today I am pleased to present this guest post from Lesley Roessing, Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project and Senior Lecturer in the College of Education, Armstrong State University. Lesley is the author of No More "Us" and "Them": Classroom Lessons and Activities to Promote Peer Respect and Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically and Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core both From Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
By Lesley Roessing
What can teachers do when they have only a partial class period, a day of high absenteeism, or students who have lost focus because a holiday break is overshadowing academics and every other class is showing movies? What can teachers do when their six students athletes are leaving early for a championship game, when the nurse’s office is calling students one-by-one for dental checks, when 60% of the class is out because they have Confirmation practice, Take Your Child to Work Day, or the flu, when class will be interrupted by a fire drill or an assembly, or when class follows a grueling morning of standardized testing? These interruptions and distractions happen more frequently than we would care to admit, causing teachers to lose productive academic time. So how can teachers use this time and maintain academic integrity? Play word games.
Vocabulary is a reading skill. Vocabulary is one of the greatest predictors of reading comprehension. Knowing lots of words supports fluency; the more exposure to words, the better readers read and comprehend. Teaching vocabulary is a strategy for increasing reading comprehension in all disciplines. But this isn’t a blog about vocabulary-teaching strategies—it is about finding time for more vocabulary exposure, more time with words, and using that disrupted time to do so. Research shows that two strategies for increasing vocabulary knowledge are active engagement and motivation, i.e., wordplay. Teachers can employ those interrupted, distracted periods for active engagement and wordplay.
I always had six or seven Scrabble boards in my classroom. I favor the turntable type for two reasons: the spaces for tiles are recessed so if students bump the board, the pieces do not fall off. Also the board can be turned without disturbing the Russ on Reading: Finding Time for Productive Vocabulary Play:
