Week 7, Assignment 3

• Explain the three levels of words and how you can use word levels to decide which words to teach.

The first level of words are common, familiar words like “bad”, “good”, “look”, etc. that do not need to be taught. The second tier words are those who appear in everyday conversations, or in newscasts that do need to be taught, words like “tornado” or “democracy”; these words would require most of the effort of an ELA teacher.  The last level includes highly technical words and are more content specific, and need to be taught by the subject teacher. 

• How do you teach your students to "chunk" words as a strategy for decoding unfamiliar words? When do you provide this instruction?

Chunking should be taught at a level when students begin to deal with multisyllabic complex words. This strategy requires that the student knows\a variety of word parts, blends and sounds.   Teaching “chunking” involves helping the student break a word into three parts, and eventually graduate to just breaking them into beginnings and endings.  At first, we could write the word, identify the chunks and then put them back together. Eventually, the student can use their thumb to cover part of the word, and finally, the student will become proficient in breaking the words apart in their heads, without having to stop and follow a specific procedure.

• Based on Professor Allington's comments and the classroom examples, what are some ways you might foster word study in your classroom?

 Some ways to promote word study is by allowing the students to work with a partner to try and create connections between a word and their lives and see if they can come up with the meaning.  Another way is by allowing the students to build upon a word wall, by posting words that they don’t know, or that they find interesting and spending some time at the beginning of class talking about those words. Lastly, and interactive word wall also built by students can also promote word study because it would require that the students look up those words to add the definition, but also encourage drawing or looking up a picture to go with the word.