The Sweetest Town on Earth

Just back from attending the Keystone State Reading Association conference in Hershey, PA. Where one actually can smell chocolate in the air.

I made the six hour drive through hill and dale to sign some books and do a session on my and Sara’s new vocabulary book. Here’s a short video of some Big Word poems created by some Pennsylvanian teachers who attended my workshop.

Now when we work on big words we are not talkin’ necessarily about long or hard to understand words – rather we mean words that carry a lot or meaning. Tier two words according to Beck (don’t worry if you don’t know the reference – it’s pedagogy stuff.)

I like to introduce this method of vocabulary acquisition with some words that are packed with meaning that the students already have some ideas about and once we have our lesson process established then we start introducing  content area vocabulary into the mix.

I'm headed to Eastlake Middle School tomorrow to work with my friend Libby Royko’s 8th graders where we will be writing some vocabulary word infomercials using words from their science class geology unit. So you can expect some rock star videos in the near future. in the meantime here’s a quick one from PA.