The vocabulary I see in my Kindergarten classroom is mostly involving the main word wall in the classroom and then a separate word bank at the writing center. The main word wall has high frequency words, such as "in", "and", and "like". It also has all the students' names. The word bank at the writing center where students do a lot of journaling consists of a group of words that relate to each other. For example, the word bank yesterday had a number of words related to Spring and then at the bottom had the phrase, "are a sign of spring." The students were to pick a word or two from above, such as "green grass" and "violets", write those words and then finish their sentence with "are a sign of spring." They finished the center by drawing a picture to represent what they wrote.
I don't see the vocabulary they are doing as building on new vocabulary, but just introducing new words for them to write in their journal. The word wall is the most useful because the students are able to move to that part of the room and find the word they are looking for instead of me spelling it for them. This has shown to be a big benefit when it comes time for assessing how many high frequency words the students know.
1 comment:
Liz, like your classroom, mine too, focuses more on high frequency words. Many of these words are words the students already know but may not know how to spell or identify these words yet. I do not have a word wall in my classroom but the Top Ten Theme words which consists of ten high frequency words such as "you" or "he," is posted in the back of the classroom. I think it would be even more beneficial for these students if they also had a word wall to write tricky vocabulary words on from the books that they read in class. The students often discuss these tricky vocabulary words briefly but never return to them to review what they mean. By having a word wall to write them on the students would be continually exposed to the words and be able to refer to them and review them.
~Sarah
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