You May Think Vocabulary is Boring but its Not with Literacy Nerds Beth Lawrence and Deena Seifert Transformative Principal 335

Literacy nerds Beth Lawrence and Deena Seifert cofounders of infercabulary.com

• Infercabulary is a web-based k–12 interactive tool for helping kids improve vocabulary and skills.
• speed up learning by making learning vocabulary like
• Avidly reading.
• We tend to make words simpler with oral language than authors when writing.
• SLPs by trade.
• Why should we help kids learn vocabulary?
• TedX talk
• 65% of students aren’t capable of comprehending text on grade level.
• Unless you know 95% of words in a text, it will impact your comprehension.
• A foundational skill that needs to exist is a strong vocabulary.
• Breadth and depth of vocabulary.
• If you only have a surface level understanding of a word, you can’t link it to more
• A child needs 10–12 exposures to a word in a variety of contexts to understand the word.
• Tiered words.
• Tier 1: These are the common, everyday words that most children enter school knowing already. Since we don’t need to teach these, this is a tier without tears!
• Tier 2: This tier consists of words that are used across the content areas and are important for students to know and understand. Included here are process words like analyze and evaluate that students will run into on many standardized tests and that are also used at the university level, in many careers, and in everyday life. We really want to get these words into students’ long-term memory.
• Tier 3: This tier consists of content-specific vocabulary—the words that are often defined in textbooks or glossaries. These words are important for imparting ideas during lessons and helping to build students’ background knowledge.
• Over-generalization and under-generalization
• When the author is kind enough to give you context clues.
• How to help kids who hate learning about reading.
• Semantic reasoning -
• Beta tests showed quickly that assumptions were wrong about their intended target student.
• How to be a transformative principal? Deena: Bringing words to life. Beth: Do additional homework to understand importance of vocabulary!

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