Word Aware (Spiral Bind): Teaching vocabulary across the day, across the curriculum

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It includes the fun and engaging ‘Concept Cat’ method to teach children early verbal concepts such as ‘both, corner, smooth and after’. We are still investigating different games and activities to support this approach in Literacy and are now considering what avenue to explore next. It has become an integral part of our literacy teaching and the children are able to talk about vocabulary with more confidence.

This book advocates a whole-school approach, where words are celebrated and are the subject of enjoyment. In the book, Stephen and Anna apply this to topics, literacy, concepts and emotions, but the principles are the same and I’ll talk about topic vocabulary here.It’s clearly been tried-and-tested in a range of schools, with helpful, detailed examples included of the impact this approach has had for vocabulary learners.

Motivating children to work at home for extended periods can be rather tedious, but one trick is to find games that are also educational. There are great ideas of questions to ask at the end of the lesson as well, which are more interesting and useful than “what does x word mean?Yet, although I often identify that a child has poor vocabulary (and I’m sure teachers do as well), it can be really hard to know how to tackle it. At Thinking Talking we are dedicated to improving children and young people’s language and communication skills, but we understand that time is precious, so we develop time efficient interventions that work. Stephen graduated in Speech Pathology from Flinders University, before attaining an MSc in Speech and Language Therapy from City University in 2000. It adopts a whole school approach but is equally effective for specific classes and groups or individual learners. For many children, particularly those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) or those whose home language isn’t English (ELL or EAL learners), the vocabulary of the classroom can be a barrier to learning.

It’s a good way of choosing the best words to focus on and having a manageable and useful list to focus on. Although vocabulary development is crucial for school success, it has not received the attention and interest that work on identifying printed words and spellings have received (Biemiller and Slonim, 2001). meaning aspects (other similar – but already known – words, context, putting it into a sentence etc. All of the games listed either require no resources, pen and paper, free online resources or we have provided what you need. Pupils will be taught how to work out and clarify the meanings of unknown words and words with more than one meaning.We are all very excited about this new programme and where the approach has been trialled children have enjoyed the experience.