By the second grade, students may know anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words (Graves, Juel, and Graves 1998). As their reading and writing develops, students learn, on average, 3,000 to 4,000 words a year. (Nagy and Anderson, 1984; Nagy and Herman, 1987). If you were able to try to directly teach all of those words, you would have to teach over 20 words a day (Stahl, 1999)! So how do students learn all the words they need to know? The combination of direct instruction and wide reading is a good formula for word learning.

Try the Words Words Words activity from Scholastic Red. This simple lesson illustrates the levels of word knowledge – some words may be immediately recognizable while others are completely unfamiliar.

Ask Yourself

  • Which words did you know immediately? Which ones do you use in speech or writing?
  • Which words did you recognize but had to think about before defining? Would you feel confident enough to use them in conversation or in a paper that your colleagues would read?
  • Were there any words that you just didn’t know?

mj has copyed from : http://content.scholastic.com