Chapter 7: Vocabulary PAR

Having a robust vocabulary is very important in any subject. Vocabulary is a large portion of SAT testing that high school students take to get accepted into their dream schools. Knowing how to find the definitions of words and retaining that information is important. Teachers can help students do this across the entire PAR framework. Using some of the tools presented in the previous chapters can be deemed useful, most notably graphic organizers and concept maps. There are other tools that teachers can use to make sure their students are keeping hold of the information that they are being presented in the aspect of vocabulary.

For the sake of not rambling on about all of the activities presented within Chapter 7 of our text, I will go through my most favorite ones that the book presents for each section of PAR. As far as preparation goes, I like the idea of taking an inventory to see what the students already are familiar with. Using this as a preparation activity also gets their minds set on the task at hand and hints to them that they should be looking out for the terms that they are unfamiliar with. Teachers can help students dissect the vocabulary they are reading by helping them with word roots. One of the classes in high school I found most beneficial for vocabulary was etymology. The semester was centered on learning word roots and determining the meaning of words that we had never seen before

.

Lastly, I would like to focus more on the reflection step as it has one of my favorite activities. Students can use illustrations to make sure they fully understand the concept behind a term. When taking English in 10^th grade, I remember my teacher preparing us for the vocabulary portion of the SAT every class. She presented us with a set of terms at the beginning of the week. The rest of the week she would start off by having us recall the terms by showing us cartoon illustrations. Later in the week, we had to come up with our own sentences and illustrations relating to the terms. I feel like using vocabulary illustrations in this way was more than just reflection. She was really using them across the whole PAR framework over the course of the entire week.

I have never been a huge fan of vocabulary, I would say that is probably one of my biggest areas I have to focus on when I read. I mentioned an example in the previous paragraph about an experience from my tenth grade English class. Let’s jump ahead to my junior year English class. At this point in my life, I was becoming interested in journalism and was a part of the newspaper staff which had a whole class associated with it. I expressed to my 11^th grade English teacher that I wanted to become more proficient in vocabulary and he introduced me to a really neat tool. There was a book he leant me called “Tooth and Nail: A Novel Approach to the SAT.” I felt this book was a really neat tool because I really liked to read and it introduced vocabulary throughout a novel that was written as a mystery. It was not until sophomore and junior year of high school that I really began to understand how to use vocabulary tools most efficiently, but it has made me a better reader since.