TLAC is excited to share our newest Plug and Plays that were authored, along with this blog post, by our colleague Alonte Johnson-James. The biggest barrier to students’ comprehension is often word knowledge or vocabulary. The biggest barrier to teachers’ abilities to support students is often understanding the best approach(es) to use in helping students to…
We’re excited to share this fantastic video of Jen Brimming’s English lesson at Marine Academy Plymouth. Jen and her colleagues have been working hard to make their classrooms more energetic and dynamic across the school and have been focusing on adding Turn and Talk and Call and Response into their common methods of participation to support…
My daughters just came downstairs giggling. My older daughter gently teasing my littlest for asking her in a game what the ren-dezz-vuss (i.e. rendezvous) point would be. “No silly,” said my elder. “Ron-day-voo.” But as I told my littlest, she should be proud. The mispronunciation meant that she’d learned the word through reading–she’d never heard it…
We’re writing a reading curriculum (hooray!) and that means daily review of lesson plans for me, which is great fun and lots of learning. Thought I’d share some examples of how we do it from some recent lessons. Our vocabulary goal is to use lots of active practice to build word knowledge. Start with a…
Last night, after reading aloud to my daughter and tucking her in, I was mopping up a bit of work from the day and came across this observation by Isabel Beck: “The source of later vocabulary learning shifts [as students get older] to written texts–what children read [as opposed to what they hear]. The problem is…