Words, Words, Words: Teaching Vocabulary in Grades 4-12

Regardless if you are teaching elementary school or middle school, you have students in your classroom who are poor readers and writers. Janet Allen's book -- all of them, for that matter -- are comprehensive guides to providing tips and strategies on how to assist them to "own their learning." So many pages of this book are folded down, as a means to remind me to use the strategy in my own classroom. Her book recommendations are also very handy, especially when you want to model different instructional strategies on learning new vocabulary while reading. I can't say enough about this book and the rest of Allen's books without sounding like I am repeating myself. As an educator, I value good books that help me to become a better teacher -- this is such a book. You will not be disappointed.

Words, Words, Words: Teaching Vocabulary in Grades 4-12 is an excellent resource for teachers. Janet Allen has written a book that is so practical and rather easy to follow. Chapter three entitled Alternatives To, Look it Up in the Dictionary was my favorite chapter. Believe it or not we still have teachers today telling students to look-up words in the dictionary that they don't know the meaning of or how to spell. This book offers a wide variety of teaching vocabulary. Graphic organizers are highly important to Janet Allen. I say that because her book is splashed from cover to cover with ingenious ways to use graphic organizers to teach vocabulary. I think this book is a valuable resource for fourth through twelfth grade teachers to own. I obtained my copy from a seller on Amazon for a reasonable price. The book arrived just six days later in excellent condition.

it is helpful to teach kid words and reinforce their memory. could have writen it in more interesting and attractive way

I absolutely love this book and all the great templates and ideas it gives you to help students comprehend and retain vocabulary words. Definitely beats the way I learned vocab words back then...route memorization!

Great reading resource with awesome graphic organizers and explainations!

Very pleased with the service and quality of the item.

This is a must-have for teaching vocabulary in grades 4-12! It includes teaching theory, classroom activities, games, and about 20 pages of reproducible pages for student use.

I was originally misled by this book with the subtitle being "Teaching vocabulary in grades 4-12", so naturally I thought that this would provide a flexible approach to learning vocabulary across the grades. Unfortunately it wasn't quite what I expected. I was looking for ways for my homeschooled children to learn vocabulary as self-directed as possible. I don't have the time or energy to work so hard with my own kids to learn vocabulary - there needs to be a way they can largely do it by themselves. The book basically takes on an academic feel when it mainly references 3-4 different other books and research papers on vocabulary strategies. Quite a bit of the content is spent discussing how her vocabulary instruction evolved over the years. She does discuss that emphasizing on reading alone has a strong correlation to increased vocabulary. I like that idea, but she spends most of the book on reviewing various diagramming and charting methods that still require a substantial involvement by a teacher (not terribly suitable in my homeschool setting). She does bring up a good point that truly understanding and remembering a word's meaning requires a deeper analysis of the word, mainly using various charting and diagramming. At that rate you might cover a single word in about a half-hour's time - something I don't have the time/patience/energy for, to be honest. What the author and I can agree upon is that reading is a great way to be exposed to new words - however, I'll have to look elsewhere to learn strategies for how my kids can independently learn the meanings of words and explore/expand proficiency. Looking it up in the dictionary is obviously not the most reliable means to remembering a word. There is analyzing structure of the word, of which this book barely touches upon (and no references to good books on learning word stems/etymology/etc). I'd like to believe that there are writing activities that can help explore deeper meanings of words and reinforce comprehension. It honestly shouldn't be so tough.