Every teacher is a literacy teacher
Mar. 16th, 2010 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redsnake05 posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
teachingHow many of you hear this all the time? It's like a mantra in some circles, but only in the sense that people think that if they repeat it often enough they will magically become a literacy teacher without actually having to do anything.
I was thinking about this today, while reflecting on how two words I introduced in week two of this term - genotype and phenotype, for those interested in such things - are still unfamiliar to at least three students in my class. That is, they hear me say them, they see them on the board and in their books, but they haven't internalised them. There are other words in the same boat, like dominant, recessive, homozygous, heterozygous and (for goodness sake) gene. But these two really stick out for me, because yesterday, while supervising an assessment (one of the srs bsns silent ones) a student put up their hand and asked me what the two terms meant *boggles quietly on the inside*
I think our department does the best we can with literacy. We start each lesson (up to and including year 11 (grade ten)) with a literacy or numeracy activity. These range from crosswords and wordfinds to rewriting false statements to be true, or organising jumbled sentences to make a paragraph. In class, we scaffold like crazy and have templates and exemplars. We try really hard! But it's just not sinking in.
What are your best tips on embedding vocabulary?
I was thinking about this today, while reflecting on how two words I introduced in week two of this term - genotype and phenotype, for those interested in such things - are still unfamiliar to at least three students in my class. That is, they hear me say them, they see them on the board and in their books, but they haven't internalised them. There are other words in the same boat, like dominant, recessive, homozygous, heterozygous and (for goodness sake) gene. But these two really stick out for me, because yesterday, while supervising an assessment (one of the srs bsns silent ones) a student put up their hand and asked me what the two terms meant *boggles quietly on the inside*
I think our department does the best we can with literacy. We start each lesson (up to and including year 11 (grade ten)) with a literacy or numeracy activity. These range from crosswords and wordfinds to rewriting false statements to be true, or organising jumbled sentences to make a paragraph. In class, we scaffold like crazy and have templates and exemplars. We try really hard! But it's just not sinking in.
What are your best tips on embedding vocabulary?
