What I found important from: Building the Literacy Foundation and "The Jones Family's Culture of Literacy".....

I totally see the importance of having family build a child's desire to read and work with him/her to build on vocabulary and comprehension. Now days, it does not necessarily have to be a mother or a father which does this. A great example of this was how the Jones Family worked together to ensure all family members received exposure to different forms of literature to improve upon his/her ability(ies) regardless of who provided the opportunity, it was a family affair.

Another thing that stuck out to me was the importance of the teacher reading aloud in the classroom and the opportunity given to the student(s) to have individual reading time.

I have brainstormed so many different ways to make this fun for my future students...Of course, whichever school I end up teaching in will ultimately affect how I implement my ideas.
One way I think would be fun for the kids is to incorporate reading stations spread throughout the classroom, not just in a reading corner... maybe on bean bags or something the kids will find as "fun."

Another idea is to include activities within other content areas (e.g., science, social studies, etc.) that will force learning of new and challenging vocabulary words. One way of this might be to conduct a treasure hunt in our room where the students can only move on to the next clue once he/she has determined the meaning of a given word and provided an example sentence making use of this word. This is just one idea.


Can you think of other activities to engage your students in the learning process and build upon their vocabularies?  What about ways to ensure they don't just acquire a vocabulary but a meaningful vocabulary? Thanks for sharing:-)