Early vocabulary development is a huge predictor of later academic success. The more words that kids know and understand, the better readers they will be when they get older.
~ Zeba McGibbon from Episode 76 of The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast
Episode Summary
This episode is the first of a mini-series on literacy. We’ll begin with the importance of vocabulary development for young learners and its role as a predictor of reading success.
I share strategies for effective vocabulary instruction, including explicit teaching during read-alouds and interactive games that encourage peer engagement. As always, I emphasize the value of play and discuss creating meaningful learning environments, such as Dramatic Play Centers.
In this episode I share:
- Importance of Vocabulary in Kindergarten
- Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary
- Engaging Vocabulary Games
- Vocabulary Learning through Play
Related Episodes:
Resources:
Connect with Zeba:
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- Facebook – @kindergartencafe
- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
Read the Transcript
[0:00] Hey there teacher friends, it’s Zeba from Kindergarten Cafe, and today I’m launching into a sort of mini-series on literacy. I did a mini-series a couple months ago on math and heard really awesome things from all the listeners out there, all of you, and so I decided to do the same thing with literacy. So we’ve got a couple of varied topics for you within the literacy umbrella, and so today we’re launching into vocabulary, how to teach vocabulary, why it’s important, and then future episodes will include how I teach sight words with my students and how I do science of reading literacy centers. So we’ll get into all of that, but let’s start today with teaching vocabulary.
[0:41] Music. You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast, where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress all while using effective And purposeful lessons that students love? Let’s get started. Music.
[1:35] I think teachers of kindergartners will all be able to tell you that teaching vocabulary is super important. Because when kids don’t have important vocabulary skills, they miss out on a lot of directions, oral language, reading comprehension, writing, being able to communicate with their peers, understand what their peers are saying. Like it impacts a lot. And so we want to make sure that as teachers, all the kids in our class have basic vocabulary, but also that we’re continuing to teach all of our students the next level of vocabulary so they’re able to understand what they’re reading in their books and what they’re learning about in class. Also, early vocabulary development is a huge predictor of later academic success. The more words that kids know and understand, the better readers they will be when they get older. It’s also an important strand in Scarsborough’s Reading Rope. Now, I’m wondering if you’ve heard of that before, but Scarsborough’s Reading Rope is a good way to understand all the different components of reading. Okay. Because reading is made up of so many different parts. So in Scarsborough’s Rope, we have the language comprehension strand, which includes background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge, like print concepts. Then you have the word recognition strand. So that’s phonological awareness, decoding, sight word recognition.
[2:59] And then that all gets wound together for skilled reading. So the strands are important to make sure that as teachers, when we’re teaching kids to read, we’re hitting on all of those strands. And so, like I said, vocabulary is an important part of that. It kind of connects with background knowledge. Like we want kids to be able to have the knowledge and the vocabulary to understand what they’re reading. And we’ll be talking about Scarborough’s Rope more in the coming episodes for our literacy miniseries. But I definitely wanted to highlight it today as for one of the reasons why we should focus on teaching vocabulary with our students. So we all agree, teaching vocabulary is important. How do we do that in kindergarten?
Well, the first way we can do that is explicitly during a read aloud or a mini lesson. We can pick out the new words we want to teach to our students, whether they’re important curriculum words like evaporation for water or roots, for plants. I mean, they could be content-specific words, or they could be words that are important for just English language, like talking about comparing words. Longer than, shorter than. I mean, that’s more content with math, but like that concept of like comparing but adding than, greater than, or emotion words, like excitedly. I mean, there’s so many different words that we could pick, and they kind of depend on what’s the goal of the lesson. So is the goal content? Are we doing a read-aloud where we might want to point out a couple words that we could teach kids? That’s sort of how I go about choosing the words. So when I know the word I want to teach my students, I follow the framework called seven steps that’s which is a strategy we use with English language learners, because what’s good for our English language learners in terms of teaching vocabulary is going to be good for all of our learners, actually. But this strategy is called seven steps, which is more for the older kids. So I’ve pared it down to be more five steps.
[4:59] But essentially, you say the word and you have the kids repeat it. If I’m teaching them the word excited or excitedly, I would say the word excitedly and then I point to them and have them repeat it excitedly and then I say it again and we go back and forth three times because I want the kids to say it three times. The more exposure and practice that kids have with the word, the more likely it’s going to stick, right? So that’s why we want them to say the word three times and they’re going to use it again in the next coming steps.
[5:29] So after I have them repeat the word three times, and again I’m going back and forth with them, make sure that they’re pronouncing it correctly, then I will give them a kid-friendly definition for that word. So excitedly means that someone is doing something in an excited way, really happy to be doing it, right? And then I’ll give an example with that word. So I excitedly walked into class because I could not wait for the fun day I had planned. Then after that, I’m going to give them a sentence starter for them to use the word in a sentence. So, for example, I excitedly blank, and then I would have them say something that they did excitedly.
[6:12] Oh, and before that, I would actually, like, especially for this word, I would highlight if there’s a certain part of the word that needs to be taught, like excitedly, that lee part, I would say, like, that means that someone’s doing something in that way. But in kindergarten, I don’t tend to focus too much on that grammar aspects, prefixes, suffixes, that kind of stuff, but definitely for older kids, that’s a great place to talk about that. And so then, like with older kids, they might write the word down and write the definition. But in kindergarten, I think that what I’ve done is enough for them to engage with the word, really understand it. And then if I know, if I’ve picked it out for the book, maybe I will definitely keep talking about it. Like, oh, look at her doing this excitedly here. Like, what is it that she’s doing excitedly? And have the kids talk about it. I don’t just teach it once and leave it.
[6:59] Whenever possible, whenever I’m teaching new words, I love to include visuals, especially for content-specific words like, for example, evaporation, roots. I would definitely want to include a picture with that. If you have space in your classroom to put those word cards up, that works really well. The kids know they can go to it for help with spelling or if they need help figuring out which word means which. But showing a picture really helps all students understand the word that you’re saying and again for content specific words like just the more that you can get kids to interact with those words use those words in their reading writing and the more that you can reframe their words so they’re talking to you about something and not using that vocabulary word if you can add in the vocabulary word to their response that would be really helpful that would be really helpful for them.
So for example, if they say like, oh, yes, I saw the water dried up. You can say, yes, you saw the water evaporate, right? Helping them remember to use that word. And more often than not, they’ll say, yeah, it evaporated. Like they’ll take the word that you said and use it the next time that they are answering you and they’ll use it in response to you. So this strategy for teaching explicit words is really good for those sort of next level vocabulary words, the content specific words, anything like that. But what about teaching regular words, words that you kind of think that kids should know, but if they don’t know, it really is problematic.
[8:28] So I like to play games with my students and I actually have a vocabulary center with my students. And these games are really good ways to help teach students the vocabularies that they need while playing with each other.
[8:42] The first fun way that kids can engage with vocabulary and build for vocabulary knowledge is through category sorts. So just sorting picture cards into categories and letting the kids come up with the categories gets the kids to talk to each other about what the object is and what the bigger category is. The other game you can play is which one doesn’t belong or which two belong, where the kids are looking at four objects and they have to explain to their partner which two belong together and why. Or which one doesn’t belong in a category and why. So like what is the category of the other three? So for example, if you have a rocket ship, a moon, a telescope, and an astronaut, which one doesn’t belong? I could say to my partner, well I think the astronaut doesn’t belong because it’s a person and the other three are objects. The other person could say, I think the telescope doesn’t belong because the other three are all in outer space. So just right there the kids are using a ton of important vocabulary to explain their thinking. And if there’s a kid in that group that doesn’t know one of those objects’ names, they’re going to hear it from their peers. But they’re also learning the vocabulary for the categories, and they’re hearing the kids defend their ideas and explain their reasoning. And so all that’s really important for oral language development and vocabulary development.
[10:00] The next type of game I have is more of a describing vocabulary game. These ones are my kids’ favorites. So the kids will pick out a card. It’s like heads up, but they pick up a card from inside the bag and they have to describe that object to the people in their group and the people have to guess what it is. So by describing the object, they’re using a lot of different vocabulary. And then the kids in the group have to know what that is, knowing the vocabulary works for the object. And if they don’t, they’re going to learn it from their peers. And so the kids have so much fun with that game. The other one is called I Spy. And so I have a picture mat with a ton of random things on there. And the kids play I Spy with it and give clues to have the person find the object that they’re thinking about.
[10:47] So those are both really fun ways for the kids to practice describing objects and learning vocabulary from each other. I’d also add that anytime you have storytelling as a center or an activity or a play activity, and I have a retelling center where the kids are retelling parts of the books that they love that we’ve read several times and they’re acting out the story, those are great ways for them to incorporate the vocabulary from the book and use that to retell the story, but they’re also practicing using the words themselves. And again, every time that we can get kids to interact with and engage with the vocabulary words, it’s going to stick more and they’re going to remember the word. They’re going to use it in their own everyday language.
[11:32] Kind of related to this as well, but when I have my Dramatic Play Center set up, I always include a word wall in the Dramatic Play Center, and I include labels on all the objects that I’m putting in there. And so this is a fantastic way for kids to learn vocabulary in a more content-specific area. So for example, if I have it set up in a grocery store, they’re going to learn grocery store-specific vocabulary. If it’s a doctor’s office, they’re going to learn what stethoscope means. They’re going to learn what shot, band-aid, medicine, chart. They’re going to learn what all of these words mean, and then they’re going to engage with them in a really playful way. And they’re going to really internalize the words and use it with their peers in their play. And that’s the best way to help them learn. Playing is the best way to help kids learn. But we’ve talked about that before in previous episodes.
[12:23] So overall, we definitely want to make sure that we are teaching kids explicitly vocabulary, but we can also make sure that kids are learning important vocabulary through games where they are talking about vocabulary categories, as well as describing objects with important vocabulary words, and also learning the vocabulary to describe objects is important, and through play.
[12:46] Play in general with dramatic play especially, kids can learn important vocabulary words. So I hope you found some things that you can take and teach right away in your classroom. The easiest way to get started on this would be to pick up a book, pick a word in there that you want to teach your students and try those five steps with them and see how they engage with the vocabulary words and interact with them. And notice how giving the kids a chance to interact and engage with the vocabulary. It helps them retain and learn the vocabulary word so much more. Awesome.
[13:23] Well, our quote of the day is a vocabulary quote of the day. My kid said yeast you know the stuff that farts in the bread accurate definition of yeast, awesome okay well so stay tuned next week for how I teach sight words in my class if you have any questions about all things literacy or anything related to kindergarten my email and dms on instagram are always open you can always send me the code word vocabulary to let me know you’re listening to the episode. I love hearing from you. When you do that, it’s like such a fun surprise to my day. And I can’t wait to hear from you. Awesome. We’ll see you in the next episode.
[13:59] Music.
[14:04] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources, or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies. If you liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a friend. I’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips. See you then.