Having a large vocabulary is a large predictor of reading success and a big component of learning to read. It needs to be taught alongside other literacy skills. This blog post will go over several ways to teach kindergarten vocabulary to your students and help them practice their vocabulary skills.
Why Teach Vocabulary?
Teaching vocabulary is an incredible piece to the puzzle of how we teach children how to read. It is one of the strands in Scarborough’s Reading Rope. Children come to us knowing a certain amount of words and that plays a big role in their ability to learn to read. It will be much, much harder to read a word they’ve never heard before versus a word they are familiar with.
Mark Seidenberg wrote about this in his book: Language at the Speed of Sight. He wrote “Knowledge of a vocabulary word is a learned association between form (a spoken, or later, written pattern) and meaning….Vocabulary… develops by adding hubs and building connections to these many types of knowledge, a process that continues through the lifespan… A person can infer much about the meaning of a new word because it occurs in the same contexts as familiar words.” Additionally, Seidenberg tells us that “Five-to six-year-old English learners have vocabularies in the range of 2,500 to 5,000 words, and they add about 3,000 words per year (about eight words a day) for the first several years of learning”. If students struggle with growing their vocabularies it will greatly impact their ability to be successful readers.
How to Teach Kindergarten Vocabulary?
We can help students learn new words. The most effective way to teach kindergarten vocabulary words is with a daily read-aloud. Reading aloud to students and picking a few words to define in the read-aloud is extremely effective for teaching students vocabulary. I also encourage families to continue reading aloud to their children so the children can be exposed to even more new words.
Academic Vocabulary
When we are teaching academic content, we know that there will be words that students need to learn in order to understand the topic. We should create visual vocabulary cards when we can to help students match the object with the word. It’s also a bonus word wall for students to use when writing about the word.
When students are learning a new kindergarten vocabulary word, we want to help them make connections to other words that they already know. In order to learn a word, students should be able to first, understand the word spoken to them and then later be able to use the word when speaking. That oral language understanding will come first before we should expect students to use the word in reading or writing. To learn more about supporting oral language development, you can check out this blog post on phonological awareness or this blog post on writing warm-ups. However, one way to help build the connection for reading and writing (more so for older students) we can give our students these vocabulary sheets to write down the new word they learned and to practice using it in a sentence.
5 Steps
Both the specific academic kindergarten vocabulary and more general and common words need to be taught and explained to all children, but English language learners especially benefit from this. I have a blog post on supporting students with learning English. You can learn more there about the vocabulary strategy called the “5 Steps” but I use this whenever I am teaching my students a new vocabulary word.
Kindergarten Vocabulary Games
Category Games
We can also use different games and activities to help build connections for students between words they already know and words they do not know. Thinking about how different words connect or are similar is the basis of the games “Which Two Go Together” and “Which One Doesn’t Belong” where students have to discuss which two objects go together in a group and why or which one object doesn’t belong in a group that the other objects belong in. This relies on the students deciding how these objects fit together in a category. Another great category game is to simply let students sort objects (or pictures) into their own made-up categories. After looking at all the images, how might they fit together in different categories? All of these games involve a lot of oral language too, because the students have to explain their reasoning for the different categories.
Describing Games
Another way to support students in learning and practicing kindergarten vocabulary words, as well as develop their oral language development, is to play “I Spy” and “Headbands”. In I Spy, students look at a picture with a lot of different objects in it and have to give clues about an object in the picture for their partner to guess. This means they have to explain and describe the object, and their partner has to practice using the name of the object to guess it.
“Headbands” is a similar game where students have to give a clue to their partner to guess the object. Students take turns looking at a card that has a picture of something on it (an object or animal) and then they give clues to the student that is guessing. Both games are fantastic practices in describing objects, using vocabulary words and developing oral language skills. Plus, the students always love playing them so much!
Conclusion
Teaching kindergarten vocabulary should be a critical part of all literacy instruction. There are some easy ways to incorporate the vocabulary instruction into what the teacher is already doing and there are some really fun games for students to keep practicing their vocabulary and oral language skills. Which strategy is your favorite? Let me know in the comments!
You can get all of the activities and games mentioned in this blog post here!
