Reading for Intermediate and Advanced Learners, Spring, 2011

One of my instructional strategy lessons is List-Group-Label. In this strategy, the teacher gives her students a piece of writing paper and says, "We are going to brainstorm all the words we can think of about a certain topic for three minutes." Our class used the topic of a bee because we were going to be reading the story "Busy Buzzy Bee" by Karen Wallace. I gave my students three minutes to write down as many words as they could think of related to a bee. The next part of this strategy was to make a class list of the words. I told the students I would write down any of their words on chart paper related to a bee, but we couldn't repeat the same words (this completed the "list" part of this strategy). The next part of the strategy is the "group" part. We looked at our list of words as a class and decided to rewrite them on another piece of chart paper. We looked at the words and sorted them into groups by their common characteristics. For example, my students had a lot of words telling what bees had and a lot of words telling what bees could do. After we finished grouping our words, we were ready for the "label" part of this strategy. We read through our groups of words as a class and decided on appropriate titles (labels) for each group. As a final activity, I read students the story "Busy Buzzy Bee" and we compared words that the author used that we put in our own list before we even read the story.

The other instructional strategy I am using is called a Vocabulary Word Box. This is a graphic organizer that helps students study difficult vocabulary words found in stories. In this strategy, students write their vocabulary word in the center box. They have four boxes surrounding the center box. Students must write the definition of the word in the top left box, write an antonyn of the word in the top right box, write a sentence with the word in the bottom left box, and draw a picture of the word in the bottom right box. The students are then required to share their words with the rest of the class. I picked 11 words from the story "Officer Buckle and Gloria" by Peggy Rathmann. I paired my students up and gave each pair a word to conduct a Vocabulary Word Box study on. I did this as a pre-reading strategy so my students would understand the words when we actually read the book.