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Feel free to use or tweak to make it your own!

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I like how this has 4 categories in which students can sort their words, based on their level of understanding.

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Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

MODULE 2

Explicit vocabulary instructional strategies are beneficial because they help children learn a set of new words that are useful in meaningful contexts. Recent research indicates that vocabulary instruction is most effective when children learn more than just to recognize a word or its picture. Vocabulary knowledge is deeper, longer lasting, and has more impact on later learning when the child can tell you what the word means, even in their own, child-like way. This does not mean that our goal is for children to memorize definitions. Instead, we use the definitions to build their conceptual understanding of what words stand for and how they connect to other words on the same subject or that mean similar things. In Module 2, we will be learning three explicit vocabulary instructional strategies. They are book embedded vocabulary instruction, network activities and category activities. Key features common among all three of these explicit vocabulary teaching strategies include: repeated exposure to words, child friendly definitions provided by the teacher, and labeling the target word for the child first instead of having the children guess the word.

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Module 2: Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

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Early Childhood Educator Preparation to Support High-Quality Language Instruction Explicit Vocabulary Instruction MODULE 2

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Taken from a K-12 district (out of state). I like how they are focusing on just a couple of strategies in the month of January AND recommends doing so in all content areas. How might you use/adapt for your staff?

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Vocabulary Sort (for using with teachers)

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Vocabulary Sort (for using with teachers)

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These Tier 1, 2, and 3 words came from HMH texts from K to 4th

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Option: Use the R&R template to add current/previously learned vocab words. Accountability could be a partner and student states a sentence or meaning of the word.

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Roots/Affixes Scope & Sequence (Grades 3+)

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Roots/Affixes Scope & Sequence (Grades 3+)

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Greek_Latin Roots and Affixes Guidance (Grades 3-8)

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Academic Vocabulary Instruction in Kindergarten

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Nat'l Center on Improving Literacy - Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

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Nat'l Center on Improving Literacy - Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

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Include a great graphic for teachers

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Teaching Vocabulary Takes More Than Just Talking About Words During Read-Aloud (Opinion)

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The Word Gap: The Early Years Make the Difference

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Preschool teachers can build on what children already know and respond to their interests to introduce and reinforce new words. Here are some things you can do to help preschoolers build their vocabularies.

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How to Monitor Vocabulary Learning (Shanahan)

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How to Monitor Vocabulary Learning (Shanahan)

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I'm a curriculum and instruction supervisor for a smaller district. We feel like we have a pretty firm grasp on assessing and diagnosing when it comes to phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, and comprehension. However, we're struggling with vocabulary. Is there any assessment you would recommend that would give us a feel if a student is approaching standard or at standard for that area?

Shanahan responds:

In recent years, I've become concerned about the amount of school testing.

My complaint isn't with the annual accountability tests (though, those are on overdose, too). No, my grievance is with the many screening and monitoring tests at epidemic levels in our schools.

It is sensible to be aware of student progress. But teachers can only use so much info and testing isn't the only way to get it.

I oppose, for instance, weekly tests of oral reading fluency-they aren't accurate enough and fluency growth rates don't justify it. Testing that 2-4 times per year should be sufficient.

A better plan, perhaps, is to have teachers monitoring performance during daily fluency lessons... five observations per day within a half-hour lesson would provide 9 looks per report card. And, there'd be little need for all that formal testing.

But I digress.

One of the big drawbacks with classroom assessment is that it overemphasizes foundational skills (e.g., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency). Don't get me wrong, those are perfectly reasonable things to dipstick and their results really can help us to target instruction.

As sensible as that approach is, it tends to lead teachers to see the kids (and their needs) through the lens of these tests.

If we only monitor progress in foundational skills, then teachers can only see foundational skills. Reading instruction then devolves to that... kids either are "doing fine" with reading (even if they are struggling with language, comprehension, and composing), or they need extra help and that extra help will be aimed at, you guessed it, foundational skills-even if the kiddos need something else.

Teachers come to not even see those other aspects of literacy. After all, the principal isn't monitoring kids' success with vocabulary or comprehension. But if we're talking about foundational skills-the ones regularly tested-then "oh doctor."

Given all that, your desire to assess vocabulary is a laudable one.

I can find no reliable/valid vocabulary test that can easily be given multiple times per year, that is predictive of kids' growth in reading, and that provides a good measure of student progress. There are lots of vocabulary measures, but none that fits that bill.

You can use something like the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) which will provide a reasonably good estimate of overall vocabulary performance. But I'm not convinced that those scores would allow you to track student growth in any meaningful way.

That's not a knock on the PPVT or its rivals. Vocabulary assessments just have not been designed to monitor vocabulary learning in any meaningful way (Pearson, Hiebert, & Kamil, 2007).

Vocabulary growth is just so diffuse. Kids watch a television show and bang they know a new word. The same for talking to a friend on the playground or eating dinner with mom or taking part in a reading lesson. Vocabulary comes from pretty much everywhere (as a boy, I learned "serviette" from the Three Stooges).

Words can get pretty specialized or particular in their use, too. I now have an extensive French vocabulary. If I come across words in that lexicon, I can understand them; that is, I have a good receptive French vocabulary. But, s'il vous plait, don't ask me what the French word for something is because my expressive vocabulary is embarrassing.

Keeping track of such dispersed and sundry learning is a formidable-and so far an impossible-task.

I think the best you can do is to adopt or create a formal vocabulary curriculum. Decide on a set of words and/or morphemes that the kids in your district will master by a particular grade level. Then teach the heck out of those words.

Vocabulary assessment, in this context, should aim to monitor student progress with the taught vocabulary. These results should correlate reasonably well with students' overall growth in word learning. Kids who learn the most words from instruction will likely pick up a lot of words from their own reading, and so on.

As with most correlations, there will be kids whose learning isn't typical.

For example, what about the kids who are smart, but who don't read much? They may learn most of the taught words, without curating many on their own. Or those, who do read a lot, but aren't particularly diligent students? They may look like they are making no vocabulary progress, while doing reasonably well on their own. Such exceptions will probably balance out.

This plan should work reasonably well-as long as the kids don't already know most of the target words. Screenings of the year's vocabulary agenda early on should give you a sense of that. Without that information, you could convince yourself that there was a lot of learning going on, when you are only seeing that the students already knew the target words. In such a case, your curriculum is undershooting the kids.

After the first year, you could even check out what growth on your vocabulary instrument would mean. There is no reason why you could not correlate student growth in vocabulary with your state test results.

I would discourage you from trying to do this with a multiple-choice instrument. That adds too many other variables to the assessment. Just print up a list of the words for the kids to write definitions for. Don't try to get into fine-grained distinctions. The student either understood a word or not. You need to keep both the test design and the scoring simple enough that 3-4 administrations per year would be possible.

Thanks for keeping the attention on language and meaning.

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How to Monitor Vocabulary Learning | Shanahan on Literacy

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A teacher asks how to monitor student vocabulary growth. This blog entry explains why that is so difficult, but then provides guidance in how to construct a curriculum-based vocabulary measure.

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Five Things Every Teacher Should Know About Vocabulary Instruction (Shanahan)

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Five Things Every Teacher Should Know About Vocabulary Instruction (Shanahan)

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Blast from the Past: This entry was first published September 28, 2019 and was re-issued on October 17, 2020. As a young man, I set out to improve my vocabulary since I knew it would improve my chances of getting into graduate school. Over a period of about a year, I learned about 400 new words (all recorded on index cards for practice). This was not a research study, I really needed to master these words. My personal impression: I couldn't believe how much my reading and listening comprehension improved during that period; things that I "kind of" understood previously were really understood with that richer lexicon. Teach word meaning well, along with other aspects of vocabulary. Teacher question: What's the best way to teach and have students master vocabulary?
Shanahan response:

My original reaction to this question was not exactly what I'd label a model of helpfulness.

The question was asked by someone new to my blog and I started to send him a note telling him I'd written about that several times already and if he searched my website, he'd find an answer to his question.

But I had second thoughts and decided to be a bit more accommodating. I still didn't intend to write a blog entry. I figured it would be generous to identify some specific links from the site, so he wouldn't have to search it himself.

I was surprised when I was unable to find much of an answer to this very reasonable pedagogical question. I've written about vocabulary a bit and have linked some vocabulary resources on my site. But there is no clear statement of what works in vocabulary teaching. Let's remedy that now.

First some preliminaries.

I've learned over the years that all words are not equal.

For instance, some words are more useful than others. Knowing the meaning of "obloquy" likely pays off less often than knowing "shame."

Readers need to know the words that authors use. You only have so much time, be sure to invest it in teaching words that will open the most doors to understanding for your students.

Another implication is that some words are learned more easily than others. I've taught myself to read French, a language I do not speak (though these days I'm even trying that). With some unknown words, looking them up in the dictionary seems sufficient to make them my words ever. But there are also slippery words that I've looked up dozens of times with success.

Teachers need to recognize-and be patient-with this great unevenness-not just across kids, but in each student's experience.

A second preliminary is the distinction between vocabulary and concept. Vocabulary refers to the labels that we associate with particular concepts or ideas, while the concepts are those ideas that the words refer to.

A word like "shimmer" will be easily learned by kids who have seen light waver, but more effort will be required for those who do not. If it is a lack of vocabulary, much of this work can be done verbally, but if it is a lack of concept, then words alone probably won't be enough.

A final preliminary thought is that much vocabulary is learned without formal teaching. We gain words from conversation, observation, television/media use, reading, and so on. We learn so many words like that that some scholars have scoffed at the value of explicit teaching. Nevertheless, research shows that teaching vocabulary can measurably improve reading comprehension-if we teach the right words well enough.

Effective vocabulary teaching has some key principles.
1. Focus on rich meanings, not just dictionary definitions.
Too often vocabulary instruction is no more than kids copying definitions from the dictionary. But researchers have identified a number of instructional approaches that outdo any learning that may accrue from copying definitions.

One of those key principles is that students work with more extensive or complex definitions or explanations of word meanings. Encourage the encyclopedia explanation over the dictionary meanings.

When I teach vocabulary, I often have the kids engage in trying to provide several different versions of a word's definition.

1. Dictionary definition

2. Synonyms for the word

3. Antonyms (if there are any)

4. Part of speech

5. Classification (what semantic group does it belong to, like tools or ways of talking)

6. Comparison (it is like____, but different because______)

7. Real-life examples

8. Graphic version (drawings, pictures, representations)

9. Acting it out

2. Emphasize the connections among words.
By the time you've come up with nine different explanations of a word you are more likely to remember it (and, of course, we can do more than just these nine if we want to get into analogies, part-whole relationships, and the like).

Many vocabulary programs introduce words by category, such as focusing on words from health and medicine or about transportation, including some that have research showing that they can be effective. However, direct research specifically on this aspect of teaching, suggest that word learning goes slower and without evident later advantage from the extra work that mastering these words entails needed to master these sets of words.

And, yet, evidence reveals that the lexicons in our heads are organized in various networks, not like dictionaries. When you remember a word, you draw from memory a plethora of related ideas-attributes, functions, and synonyms related to that word.

Start thinking diesel trucks and words like wheel, tire, dump truck, gasoline, and highway will not be far behind.

There are circumstances in which it is necessary to simultaneously introduce collections of closely related words that may require fine or subtle distinctions, such as when kids are learning about the structure of cells or atoms. I'll give that a pass, since such introductions are likely to be accompanied by a much deeper dive into the underlying concepts in such cases.

I also think it is quite reasonable when teaching words to get kids thinking about words about that concept that they may already have mastered. Linking a new word to a concept, is very different than trying to learn and link a whole collection of words.
3. Promote usage of the words.
I would avoid introducing together plethora, dearth, scarcity, cornucopia, shortage, plenty, sufficient, abundant, and liberal as some programs do. Collect such words over time as they are learned and then later you can have kids comparing the ideas or fitting them into continuum or network.

One teacher I know has her students classifying the vocabulary each week in bulletin board folders, and when a folder accumulates several related words, they revisit them as a set.

It is not enough that kids study word meanings, but they have to learn to use these words in their reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Instruction should create opportunities for kids to use words in all of these ways.
4. Review is important.
For instance, that rich vocabulary assignment that was described earlier can be done by groups of kids working together to come up with those multiple definitions. That kind of cooperation requires that kids talk with each other about the words. Additionally, I often assign small numbers of words to each group and then have them get together to teach each other the words that their groups studied... more speaking and listening.

One might reward kids for using the studied vocabulary in their writing-or that can be required in various ways.

Isabel Beck and Moddy McKeown came up with the idea of "word wizards," which gave kids extra points in vocabulary if they could bring in evidence that they had confronted or used the words of interest. Kids get very turned on if they run across some of the vocabulary when watching television or playing their favorite computer game.
5. Involve students in identifying some of the words to be studied.
It can be hard to retain vocabulary if you don't get a lot of opportunity to use it. We may teach vocabulary because certain words were prominent in the texts, we were reading this week, but then kids might not see them for a long time.

There are many ways to deal with vocabulary, such as having one day a week when you only work with words that have been taught (and supposedly learned) in the past-or perhaps entire weeks might be devoted to this throughout the year.

I'm a fan of including words from past weeks on vocabulary quizzes and for the use of vocabulary notebooks to help punch up kids' writing during revision.

Another way of ensuring the words stick, is to see how many additional words students can construct morphologically, adding prefixes or suffixes or altering parts of speech and so on. I've written about some of the important work being done on morphology by Peter and Jeffrey Bowers before (and you can search for that on my site or on Google).

I noted earlier that much vocabulary learning is incidental and, therefore, largely out of the province of schools. However, not all kids are equally good at such learning and even for those who it is easier, it can still be a tough slog requiring many experiences with a word to get it to stick.

One thing that we can do to help develop a "word consciousness" among our students is to involve them in identifying unknown words from their own reading-and to include these in your classroom curriculum. When readers get used to noticing their lack of knowledge of particular words, they will be more likely to try to resolve those gaps when reading. Kids will also be more motivated if they have some say so over the curriculum as well.

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5 Tips for Teaching Vocabulary | Shanahan on Literacy

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5 Tips for Teaching Vocabulary, This blog entry explores five principles of teaching vocabulary effectively so that students will better understand what they read.

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Explicit Vocabulary Instruction with Anita Archer

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Florida Center for Reading Research - Module 2 Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

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Florida Center for Reading Research - Module 2 Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

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Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

MODULE 2

Explicit vocabulary instructional strategies are beneficial because they help children learn a set of new words that are useful in meaningful contexts. Recent research indicates that vocabulary instruction is most effective when children learn more than just to recognize a word or its picture. Vocabulary knowledge is deeper, longer lasting, and has more impact on later learning when the child can tell you what the word means, even in their own, child-like way. This does not mean that our goal is for children to memorize definitions. Instead, we use the definitions to build their conceptual understanding of what words stand for and how they connect to other words on the same subject or that mean similar things. In Module 2, we will be learning three explicit vocabulary instructional strategies. They are book embedded vocabulary instruction, network activities and category activities. Key features common among all three of these explicit vocabulary teaching strategies include: repeated exposure to words, child friendly definitions provided by the teacher, and labeling the target word for the child first instead of having the children guess the word.

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Module 2: Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

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Early Childhood Educator Preparation to Support High-Quality Language Instruction Explicit Vocabulary Instruction MODULE 2

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Word Up pre/post assessment and diagnostic (grades 2-3)

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Free Printable Vocabulary Quizzes - Flocabulary

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Use these printable quizzes to measure students' growth with Word Up by comparing results on the pre- and post-assessments.