Nadyne Burra: Word choice, how do we increase student vocabulary within writing?

[Nadyne Burra]

Well where to begin,  I am an English teacher in the Special Education Department at Spanish Springs High School. This is my second year teaching and my first year teaching English. I feel as though I am lost when it comes to teaching writing because of my schooling background (a lot of reading). I specialized in Special Education and Elementary Education, and look at me now I am teaching high school Sp.Ed. English. I currently teach three sections of special education English (Foundations, Transitions, and SIP) and co-teach two sections of freshmen English.  In my Sp.Ed. classes we do a wide variety of reading and writing. This past semester we were focusing on reading comprehension skills with writing supports. Whereas this semester we are taking a different approach, writing with reading supports. We warm up every day either with journaling or grammar practice followed by our Writers Workshop that focuses on the Six Writing Traits.  There have been many things that worked this semester and many that need more refining on my part. I felt that many of my student's abilities have grown over the past year, and it shows in their reading scores.

My inquiry 90-minute demonstration will be based on the 6 Writing Traits and what I have doing with my students the last 6 weeks of school. I will be focusing on Word Choice, and how it makes or breaks the presentation of students' papers. Like I mentioned before, this is the first time that I have taught a Writers Workshop based on the traits, so I am very new to the topic. I want my students to become string writers, and I noticed that when it comes to their word choice it was very limited. They were either unfamiliar with synonyms or unfamiliar with the resources available to help them with word choice.  Through trial and error I decided that I wanted to focus on word choice and how to present it to special education students. But I must say that my topic focus may change within the first week or so.

[carol bergin]

Nadyne;
As a special ed teacher also (grades 5 and 6), I'm looking forward to your presentation. For the vocabulary expansion in writing, I use a year-long, student-made dictionary. It's a lot of work, and really not totally useful until later in the year, but the format is not just definitions, but also thesaurus-like; including homonyms and synonyms. The entry words are those I choose from our weekly vocabulary words. Sometimes, with our grades, we add only two to four words per week.

[Natalie Russell]

Hi Nadyne,
I'm looking forward to your presentation on word choice because it's something that I struggle with teaching at TMCC as well and a skill that is difficult to teach because a wide vocabulary seems more innate for those who have read a lot throughout their lives. I have my reading students collect 3 words a week on a spiral bound set of notecards and then they put one up (with its definition & picture) for the class on oversized "post-it" notes once a week. You've probably heard of these "word walls" with your Elementary Ed background, but they work pretty well for college students too! The problem, as you know, is the transfer of learning a new word to actually using it, whether in speech or writing. I also have them collect words from the novels we read (especially Life at These Speeds, which I'm going to do my Lit Share on) and then, as a class, we choose a sampling to include on an exam. I hate to just test them on a bunch of random words, though; I know there has to be a better way to encourage them to use them effectively. As I'm writing this response, it's helping me brainstorm some ways of having them include at least one in paragraphs we write each week or in the journals they write in response to the novel--that could just work! :) I'm sure your presentation will help many of us, so thank you for tackling this topic!
Natalie