A word about working with WORDS

If you have not yet seen it, I would highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of Pathways to the Common Core by Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth, & Christopher Lehman.

The truth is, somehow in the course of the last few years, most classroom educators have lost track of the movement around Common Core. Most of us in MN were initially told that we were not adopting the CCS for ELA, but as you know that has changed, we have. From my perspective, many of us have found ourselves responsible for teaching these standards with very little professional learning about their stark difference to the old standards we used. This book helps to answer the questions you are too embarrassed to ask and provides you answers you can discuss with colleagues and families.
Anyway, one of the most helpful chapters for me has been Chapter 10: Overview of the Speaking, Listening and Language Standards,  because one of the major shifts that comes with these new standards is the way we approach teaching conventions, knowledge of language and vocabulary acquisition. These 3 points are the most meaningful to ponder in light of the actual day to day instruction in all grade levels:

1. "Students need immersion in rich oral and written language, meaning they need to read a lot and be involved in literate conversations in literacy-rich classrooms"
2. "Students do need some words to be specifically taught, but teachers should select words that cross many content areas and will be current and visible in students' experience. This is because, for these explicitly taught words to stick, a students must experience them across contexts at least twelve to fifteen times on average. This means words of the week will not have lasting power unless they are attended to in reading, writing and listening across the day as well as across the year."
3. "Students need to learn how words work and gain the sense that words can be formed from other words and that words with similar spellings often-though not always- can have meanings derived from one another. This means that vocabulary instruction should not just be centered on word lists but should teach students to be active word solvers."

I am not sharing this to dismiss the teaching of sight or content specific vocabulary. I share it to prompt thinking about why we spend as much time as we do on individual words, their structure and meaning when the reality is, students can often find the meaning and have the spelling corrected as they type it faster than they can access the background knowledge we hoped to build. Instead, these new standards want is to focus on guiding them to be meaning makers and word solvers.