Russ on Reading: Vocabulary Instruction: Try Word Riffs

Russ on Reading: Vocabulary Instruction: Try Word Riffs

Vocabulary Instruction: Try Word Riffs

Many young readers hit a wall when their reading demands that they decode longer and longer words. Research has shown that instruction in morphology (roots and affixes) can help readers make this transition. Some excellent resources are available for teaching morphological understanding. One that I particularly like is the Word Ladder approach of  Dr. Tim Rasinski. Word Ladder books for various grade levels are readily available from Scholastic, but lately Tim has been posting Word Ladders on his Twitter feed. You can follow him @TimRasinski1 to get his latest freebies. 

I have had success with a variation on the Word Ladder, adding an element of the Think Aloud, in my own teaching. I call it, for lack of a better term, the Word Riff. The idea of the Word Riff is to help students use morphology in decoding, expand student vocabulary, and turn students on to the richness and logic in the English language. 

The Word Riff grows out of each students' Vocabulary Self-Collection Notebook. As a part of the student's interactive notebook they keep for my class (a place for reflections, reading responses, notes, etc.) I ask the students to collect new, unknown and interesting words they run across in their reading. The student is asked to identify the word, the context (sentence) the word was found in, a best guess definition of the word, and a dictionary definition of the word. If you would like to read more about the CONTINUE READING: Russ on Reading: Vocabulary Instruction: Try Word Riffs