This week I will be addressing Meaghan Jackson's blog post on vocabulary development; Vocabulary Development Can be Fun?. First of all the blog post by Meaghan was great and I appreciated the way that she incorporated Zipke and her personal experiences into her blog post. Meaghan and I share common views on how education should be viewed and how we want to teach! We have the same ideology that teaching should be both educational and enjoyable for the students in order to get the best results. I enjoyed when Meaghan stated:
"If children are engaged in what they are reading, find joy in it, and excited to learn about new vocabulary words they may come across because of that joy, I think that is success. Reading is essential in vocabulary growth, especially in the younger grades, therefore, the more time children spend reading (and enjoying what they are reading), the more successful they will be in reading comprehension and beyond" (Jackson).
This quotation above from Meaghan also reminds me of Tompkins and Tompkins thoughts on having a child read more. "Vocabulary knowledge and reading achievement are closely related: Students with larger vocabularies are more capable readers, and they know more strategies for figuring out the meanings of unfamiliar words than less capable readers do (Graves, 2006). One reason why capable readers have larger vocabularies is that they do more reading" (Tompkins, 220). Students that are more inclined to read have a better success rate than students that don't, vocabulary knowledge is linked to reading achievement, and one way that we can create reading achievement is to help the students that we have in our classroom find reading materials that they enjoy.
My question to you is how can we relate this to Muhammad's sense of joy in the classroom? Can we use this joy that we want to create in our classrooms to help implement to HRL framework into the classroom? How can we use Muhammad to help create vocabulary growth through all grades?
As we look to what we should use in the classroom and what how we should teach, this quote is closely related to Muhammad's HRL framework and connecting joy to educational growth. Using texts that can have an interpersonal relation to the student can create the growth that needs to be seen in the classroom. Muhammad references a text by Geneva Gay in her text, "Gay (2010) suggests that students' interest and engagement in learning increase when educators use pedagogies connected to their experiences. Additionally, teachers using this approach see curriculum as a tool of power and a disruption of marginalization" (Muhammad, 45). This in turn shows that students that receive this type of education create better growth through care for the students and the material that they are being taught.
Muhammad's HRL framework can also help build vocabulary and comprehension through differentiated texts that the students can identify with and her thoughts of criticality and intellect through the framework. Reading layered texts that are in the students interest area, have the students develop opinions about the texts that they are reading and having the students analyze texts are just a few examples that I can think of that would help incorporate the HRL framework into the classroom.
It is clear that this topic of vocabulary instruction has made an impression on you Chloe. I wonder if you think that creating a classroom culture that emphasizes "literary character" (as Muhammad describes in Chapter 1) might also help to foster a natural curiosity about language.
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