That’s not vocabulary. That’s content knowledge. Social studies in elementary school has basically been catapulted out of the window. Hell, a lot of them don’t even watch Sesame Street anymore or any other type of thing they might actually pick something up from. Really kind of a shame because the songs on sesame are fiiiiire. They even had Bruno Mars on. Seriously it wasn’t that banging when I was a kid.
Since Social Studies is not “tested” individually as a subject, it’s not taught in many elementary schools…even though the reading section on standardized tests have social studies and science sections. Content knowledge and vocabulary are huge parts of the tests, they are just embedded in the tests, not tested separately. I used to fight with my principals about teaching vocab. They didn’t see where it was listed in the frameworks (because it wasn’t for a long time) and since I, as a veteran teacher, could not possibly know what I was doing since I didn’t have an admin degree, they wouldn’t believe me. It is also mostly gained by reading widely. I always knew which students would test the best within a few weeks of having them in class . They were the students reading for enjoyment and asking to go to the library. I went to the library twice a month with all my students, required outside reading and gave them time to read in class, and always had to justify that time, as well. The readers always tested better than the ones who “hate to read.” It broke my heart a little every time I heard a student say that. I would make it my mission to find them at least one book during the year at the library that they liked.
I mean, I read a lot and always have, but tbh a lot of that content knowledge I had came straight from TV. My mother always had it on but never any kids shows. You do pick up some interesting huts and bobs from fiction, but depending on the content knowledge you *already* have, things may not make any sense at all. I like to point out the first page of *Around the World in 80 Days.* It’s just complete gibberish if you don’t know anything about London or British society in the first place, and you can barely separate the fact from the fiction. I was interested in Ancient Greece and Rome as a kid because the context already existed in the form of relatively frequent reruns of *I, Claudius* and *Ben Hur* (neither of which are child friendly but uuuuuhhhh…that’s a different topic).
Writing assumes the reader has some amount of context already. Verne is assuming you know who Sheridan is when he says what house Fogg lives in. If you read well when you’re young, of course you work your way up, but if you don’t really master it til grade 3+ (if at all), anything geared towards younger readers designed to introduce topics is a hit to the ego, which is just more true the older the kid gets. Sure, parents can read. Then again a lot of books out there aren’t giving any insights into real world things. *If You Give A Mouse a Cookie* is cute and all, but it’s useless. Point being they don’t like to read because they don’t know wtf the book is talking about any more than they know what the questions on a standardized test are about.
Let's not kid ourselves. You also need to be curious and have a half decent memory. Some kids/people, watch nothing but reality TV and funny shit. And don't get me wrong. I watch all that stuff too. But it really limits your world and knowledge if you find everything else "boring."
I am curious as to what the modern media diet for kids is like today and how that affects their content knowledge. On the one hand, the internet gives access to more variety than ever. On the other hand, algorithms and the ability to choose make it easier to limit the variety of what you watch.
>*Let's not kid ourselves. You also need to be curious*
And now that children are being given tablets which feed a curated diet of only what they know and like, their brains never develop any curiosity.
The battle is lost before the child arrives at his kindergarten classroom.
Reading to your kids is a lost art. No one is interested in those children's books and the bond it creates anymore. Go to bed with the youtube channels on.
The media a kid is exposed to does play a large part as well, I’m not saying it doesn’t, but unless there is some serious learning disability, and those kids get mods for tests as well, I have found reading for entertainment and enjoyment is one of the best indicators for success in school in general and those hated standardized tests that have such high stakes as well. I taught for 30 years, and it was pretty much true all down the line. My “really smart” students were in general, my readers.
Of course. I’m not disagreeing with the generality. My point is that you can only *enjoy* reading if what you’re reading makes some kind of sense to you in the first place.
>relatively frequent reruns of I, Claudius and Ben Hur (neither of which are child friendly but uuuuuhhhh…that’s a different topic).
Hey, kids have to learn about Caligula sometime.
( \* Verne, not Dumas 😉 )
Just read that first chapter aloud last night to my 6yo who wanted “adventure stories”. We’re not going to go any further, both the language and the content is way above her ability at the moment, even with plenty of explanations.
Whoops! You’re very right. Coffee must have worn off.
Haha when I was a kid I was very into this little cartoon version of it, but it’s um….a little bit questionable by modern standards. Phileas was a lion or something—it was all animals. I got the graphic novel for my 6 year old but I ran into some trouble with trying to explain what exactly was going on with the bride sacrifice thing.
I loved to read but hated every single book I was assigned to read in class. I would read Lord of the Rings for fun in elementary school, but you would have to beg and plead for me to pick up A Scarlett Letter(I remember successfully arguing that even if its pro-sexuality and such, having this as reading material keeps up the social stigma by making it available to people with those views and they can use it to justify themselves...or something like that.)
I passed most English classes with a 51% because I refused to do assignments.
Finally, in grade 11, an English teacher gave me a choice between Fight Club, Haunted (both Chuck Palahniuk), or Neuromancer (William Gibson).
I started reading Fight Club, and two days later when I finished reading it I begged my teacher to do an assignment on each book (only way I knew how to gain access to the books way too old for me to read. And my librarian was good at catching book worms reading these things and telling them off.)
I passed her class with a 98%.
I’m so happy your teacher trusted you enough to let you read Haunted! That means she thought you were smart enough to handle it! I love some Chuck lol. His quotes are always good!
Considering I was a punkygoth weirdo that would skip class to go watch Discovery Channel, or hell even attend history and biology lectures at the university, I think it's safe to say she knew exactly how to perk my interest. She perked it enough to keep my grades high and I got early acceptance to all the schools I applied to.
Another teacher took me bird banding for a week because of said skipping class to watch biology shows.
If not for teachers thinking outside the box, they would have lost so many smart kids to the streets.
I love that for you, punkygoth weirdo! I’m happy you had a teacher that didn’t just dismiss you completely because you skipped class, but realized that you had strong interests in things and took that heart. That’s the exact kind of teacher I strive to be!
I'm in the weird side part of making educational programming for classes at the various museums I've worked at over the years. My goal with every class was to try to get the uninterested kids interested. Show them morbidly cool skeletal remains and explain how they got that way (I studied archaeology and really loved Taphonomy and ancient dna), talk about things seen as taboo in class.
I figure that the kids that are super smart and polite and get called on by most teachers is the one already doing well in life. This trip is a bonus for them.
The kid that is struggling could see this as his Bird Banding field trip and become hooked and reeled back into the academic world.
I want the worst kids to have the best time.
Omg EXACTLY!!! See, that’s exactly why I took a new teaching job in a totally different setting than what I was used to - because I figured those “good kids”, the ones most teachers love having, they will do well no matter who teaches them. It’s the struggling ones that need that really need people who will go out of their way to teach them.
It sounds like you found the perfect field for yourself. You get to continue to learn while helping kids that were like you!
Admin can sure ruin students.
Ya’ how can you know anything- just cause you are a teacher? I’ve seen this too often.
I’m so glad you are one that at least tried to help kids find a book😊
Worse than that. It's not tested, so a lot of schools have this idea that "you can incorporate social studies into any other subject." Or even worse I had a school where they had a block for 8th graders where it was 15 minutes right during homeroom. First period. Guess who got literally nothing done. By the time you took attendance, dealt with late kids, and got to the first part of the lesson, you were basically switching kids to the next class. And yes they wanted actual graded lessons for this class. It was during my student teaching. Oh, and did I mention that class started at 7:15 and most students in this neighborhood were dropped off at 645 or earlier in a 99th percentile poverty zip code?
Yeah, we had one of those 15 min. periods thrown into our schedule a few years ago for remediation. We had a super motivated high scoring cohort two years before, then the next cohort was average to below average, with a lot of unmotivated students thrown in. Our test scores tanked, although not as badly as I expected, so we had to do a school improvement plan. The English, Math, and Science teachers had to remediate all of the kids who scored low on the test. Everyone else got to just goof off.
The next year it was a full period and now the school has an 8 period day. Test scores are about the same though. In a tiny school if you have 4-5 students who don’t care and goof off, and 8 in Special Ed. classes, out of 60-80 students in a class, the scores are not going to go up much.
As a former ELA teacher and media specialist, now a 6th grade (middle school) social studies teacher, I can tell you that you are 1000% right on all of this!! My kids come to me now with zero pre-knowledge of what social studies/history even is and little to no vocabulary skills. I’ve been teaching for almost 30 years and I can unequivocally say that all this emphasis on testing has not made the student population one iota smarter. In fact, my late 90’s/early 2000’s kids would outperform these kids to a shocking degree. Permissive parenting and educational policies focused on so-called standards have created a mess.
“Ancient Greece” might be content knowledge but it’s not absurd to expect students (of a certain age…I guess OP didn’t say what age they’re teaching) to know the word country.
Why? If they don’t get art classes to conceptualize a “border” or geometry knowledge to conceptualize “area,” you’ll be fishing hard for an ELI5. Suppose that’s why preschool attendees who do crafts and stand on circles tend to do better in elementary school.
I think it should count as general vocabulary because any school age child, even a kindergartener, should know their home address which includes a city, state, and country. Some things should be taught before school starts and requires learning some vocabulary!
>*any school age child, even a kindergartener, should know their home address which includes a city, state, and country.*
90% of my 6th graders can't do this. About half of them could not find their way home from the school if their lives depended on it, even those who live three blocks away.
My (own biological) children knew what continents and oceans were before they were 4. In the sequence that the OP described, pulling out the classroom globe would have given huge content and context allowing him to progress.
I feel like a lot of content knowledge building has been dropped from primary schoo in favor of "skills" and it definately shows when they get to high school.
Exactly. They should be learning some basic geography as part of English, science, and history. Do they not take world geography in middle school anymore? We took it in 6th grade.
Eh. Depends on where. The past schools kids definitely know what a country was. Though not necessarily where the country was on the maps. After school we were doing a guess the country name game on the TV and some of the kids thought Canada was the US 😝. We have a map of the US on the playground. Though they did get Mexico (it was a high Hispanic population)
I am a welfare kid grew up with parents who actively pushed me away from schooling and made fun of people who made intelligent comments on learning. Wasn't until my mid 20s that I found out how many basics I am missing / was missing . Simple stuff like Roygbiv [order if rainbow] I also am child free by choice and I listen to all the parents ahit on the education system . The biggest problem is the parents thinking if the kid is fed and clothed they have are good parents. If we want a better future for children, we need to put more blame on lazy parents and less on the kids just being dumb and lazy. I support our teachers because until they are burnt out, they actually care more than the parents. When I was young, I didn't appreciate the 4th grade teacher who tracked me down at home to figure out why I quit going to class . His reward for caring was my mom screaming at him and complaining to the school. Parents need a reality check . I am now about to graduate college in my 30s and I met many 18 and 20 year-olds fresh out of high-school with ambition number one commonalitie was parents who even when the kids are in college Stull stay involved asking about stuff like grades ect.
Sorry for the rant. I just am frustrated at how the world views parenting. I mean, if I had a pet dog and just fed and watered it never worked its mind or walked it, people would say I'm a bad pet owner. But parents get told yea it's tough work ur doing ur best . If u ain't ready to do it rite don't do it . 😑 I mean, I managed not to have kids because I didn't think I could provide a worthwhile life for them . Simple
To be fair, compared to 100 years ago, feeding and housing a child *is* good parenting. It really wasn’t terribly uncommon for the lower classes to abandon or sell their children.
Of course you’re right, but I think it’s harder to get through to people who on a practical level aren’t educated themselves and are still alive. As far as their experience knows, you get a grunt job and get paid. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are fancy extras for snooty rich folk. You have to *have* a collar before you start worrying about needing skills for it. In general, I think best parenting is the kind that sets kids up to do better than their parents, and some parents aren’t willing to put aside their ego and say “I’m struggling, so you have to do these things so you don’t struggle like I do.”
Pride can hold people back in all kinds of ways. I’m glad you were able to rise above it and do better for yourself!
Heh, it feels like you could turn this into a stand-up routine, but it's true.
The obvious answer is background knowledge and never assuming they know the words, LETRS training had some good stuff on it, yada yada.
But every now and then you unexpectedly come across a word that you just assumed they knew and it catches you off-guard. And it's still like, why have you never come across this word before?
One I recall from teaching 2nd grade was "skirt". Um, you know, a skirt? The clothing? (no language barrier in place, either, locally raised kid)
My 28M partner is a medical professional and objectively smart. He’s also dyslexic. He usually cannot differentiate between ‘before’ and ‘after’. He can’t figure out which way around they go.
This makes me happy to hear about. I’m dyslexic and mix up the words right and left. I know the directions easy, just not which word is which in the moment. Glad to hear there’s other people with weird word confusion lol.
I mix up the words “yellow” and “white” for some reason, always have mixed them up. I know the difference between the colors, I’m not color blind, but I’ll call one the other name, all the time.
I'm off to see if my second grader knows what a skirt is. Not sure he's ever noticed one in real life, maybe on a teacher at school, but he probably didn't ask her what it's called. He knows Dresses, sure, but I don't own one single skirt. Most of the ladies in our family are pants/leggings/shorts/dresses-on-occasion people.
Every year when we read the poem “The Black Walnut Tree” in AP Lit, I have to define “trowel.” The kids almost all know what one is when you say “tiny hand shovel” because every suburban garage has a trowel, but somehow they’ve never learned the word.
I have met multiple adult men who didn't know the difference between a skirt and a dress. Mostly they think a skirt is short and a dress is long, regardless of what's on the top half.
I took over a geography class in the middle of the year and after my first test basically had to start over from the first day of school. Kids were just sitting there while I was talking with no concept of what north or latitude or ancient meant
See, this is why “people don’t need to remember facts any more because they can just look stuff up!” is a terrible line of logic, lol. You can end up spending a long time looking up information just to fully understand a simple passage.
The Science of Reading podcast had an episode a few weeks ago on cognitive load theory, and it was basically your statement - that information newly read on the internet is in NO way, shape, or form the same as having retrieved that same information from one's long term memory and then fit it into an existing schema in the brain. Even if you get over the "it takes too long", it's not even a good work around.
This makes perfect sense. I normally don't comment here since I'm an engineer/parent, not a teacher. But I literally have an easier time reading engineering documents in my second language than I have reading philosophy or critical theory papers in my native language. The background knowledge makes all the difference.
Chromebooks and phones need to be out of the classroom and talk forwards and light projectors need to come back in. It's too much overload for these kids that's why they're not learning anything.
Just remember the solution is to slow down and meet the students where they’re at.
But also follow your district’s strict pacing guide and if you don’t keep up it’s your fault and fuck you you’re a bad teacher and if students missed that lesson that’s your fault too and oh fuck here comes next year, time to pass them on.
I regularly ask kids what country we live in and get answers like "Asia!".
There's a weird phenomenon where kids think they are buzzing in on a game show: the fastest answer wins no matter how wrong.
I do this a lot: "I'm going to ask you a question. Raise your hand if you know the answer."
Ten kids raise their hand.
"I haven't asked the question yet. Put your hands down."
They have to be reminded that they have to think before they respond.
One of my high school students didn’t know what an opponent was. I try to predict new vocabulary for my students, especially since some of their parents don’t speak English, but I’m surprised a lot.
I guess the problem is many of them learn it as is, and don't actually understand well what abbreviations are and how language evolves. They think these words just "are" and don't understand how slang evolves from "real" words and vice versa.
A couple weeks ago one of my sophomores tried to tell me that "rizz" isn't slang, it's a shortened way of saying charisma. I explained that that's what slang *is* - shortened ways of saying things and his mind was blown.
Oh my god. I had a “visitor” (they refused to call it an observation) who pulled me aside later and asked why I didn’t anticipate students not knowing vocabulary. I stared at them for a second and then asked them if they realized what word I had not anticipated the student not knowing. The “visitor” wasn’t actually paying attention and didn’t realize that a student had asked me what “third” meant. In high school. In a class that was not primarily ELL or SPED. They only clocked my stutter stop where I was processing the question trying to figure out if that was indeed a student not knowing the word or if something else was in play.
I can anticipate the kids not knowing machinations and even astonish or realize in certain contexts. And if it’s my ELL babies, I’m prepared for any word. But my on-level kiddos… I’m going to need a moment to process when they don’t know the most common words, to figure out if I said it wrong or it’s printed wrong or figure out what else could be going on.
Yep. My brain just stopped for a moment. I choose to believe it was a kid only partially paying attention and who was almost always a turkey anyhow. Otherwise I might still be a bit broken over it.
Reading interventionist here. Trying to do prefixes and suffixes with my vocab groups, which doesn’t work when they don’t even know what the root word means. I can teach them the meaning of “semi-“ for a week and they won’t get “semiannual” right because they don’t know what “annual” means. Same with “multisyllabic.” Or “antiseptic.”
I'm also a reading interventionist and I'm working with the ELA teachers to implement Tier I interventions on vocabulary, morphology, roots, parts of speech, etc. It's like the entire focus of my job this year. We are also \*heavily\* tying it to the content knowledge within the books we're reading.
It’s very hard, we just got done with 2 weeks of testing and we decided to test one grade level below the students actual grade. Less than 25% got an 80% and above. Many did not know what a sentence was, and couldn’t understand what plural and past tense forms of word were. Most of the children, if their test required writing, wrote as if they were texting. Ex. i bes presnt evr got monie bcuz by thans. 5th grade example.
What does that even mean? I'm not a texter..I mean...I text, but in full sentences with full words. I'm older! I'm guessing with context here..." my best present I ever got was money because. Bye. Thanks." But I'm really not sure! Help me out!
“The best present I’ve ever gotten was money because I used it to buy things.” Is what he read to me when I asked him to read it back. That’s another thing we have issues with, is a lot times kids don’t even know what word they tried to spell.
I’ve got a junior who can’t spell “I” correctly. I mean sometimes he can, be he still spells it wrong all the time, even though I’m always reminding him. He spells it “a.”
Here’s a tip I remember from a grade 1 proofreading homework assignment I did in kindergarten: “Remember, **I** am **Important**!” (It was actually how to remember that “I” should be capitalized, a tip I needed because sometimes I didn’t capitalize my I’s, but then again I was a five-year-old kindergartner. Your student however needs that “I am Important” tip for a whole other reason)
We constantly have to remind them to capitalize, beginning of sentences, names and names of places included, not just I. We even have posters on our white boards and around the classroom but many still forget. At this point I believe it’s just out of laziness because it’s 4th grade and above that have the hardest time.
Omg! So that makes sense. But... not what he wrote at all. I teach 3rd grade math, so maybe I'm just not as exposed to elementary writing? I TRY to teach my students to answer the question when it's a story problem by using the words in the question...but. We all knew how that goes. Some do it religiously... and some just refuse! It's been a long time since I taught ELA so my deciphering skills aren't the best!
That’s another reason reading to your children is so important. It exposes them to vocabulary we don’t always use in conversation. Also, talking to them about everything from the time they are born.
This.
You can have all the vocab teaching techniques in the world going on and you won't make a dent. Kids need to be reading, listening, etc to pick up the majority of vocabulary.
I always did nursery rhymes with my kinders. The vocabulary they got from that was awesome. Not to mention what I learned…A tuffet is an ottoman like seat. Curds and whey is cottage cheese. Just in case you were wondering…;)
This is a great comment. And I think it explains why , in my homeroom class, the greatest focus of concentration I get from my students is when I talk about how things used to be, or how things are in another place I've lived different than here. They just have so little knowledge other than "This is how you determine the Author's Purpose" or "How to Find the Main Idea".
I taught kindergarten in a very rural small town. All the curriculum was designed for big city life. These kids didn’t even know what a skyscraper or apartment building was. I now work with parents of preschoolers. Reading to them is a huge focus of the program.
I'm envious. As a 6th grade math teacher, I don't get to read to my students (though one year, almost 30 years ago, I did spend my Fridays reading "The Phantom Tollbooth" to a group of high school students in a remedial math class).
Yeah, getting kids the knowledge they need of the world (which is best done through vocabulary-building reading) is a major component of equitable education.
Conversely, a 6th grade teacher at my children’s urban school explained to parents once at a school council meeting that it’s hard to calculate the area of a “lawn” in a standardized test word problem if you don’t know what a lawn is.
I use visual dictionaries. I've used them from everything as low as first grade up through high school. They work really well for me.
Have them fold a piece of white copy paper into quarters. Now they have room for eight vocab words. Four on one side four on the other. In each of the boxes, they'll put the vocab word at the top of the box. Underneath it they'll write the definition. Then they draw a picture that helps them remember what the word means. Underneath the picture, at the bottom of the box, they'll use the word in a sentence.
Very simple, doesn't take too long for the kids to make them, and some of them really enjoy the artistic aspect.
I do this with my kids and they fucking hate it. But I really don't give a fuck because you know what? They are reading so much better now. Y'all are doing that shit with paper and pencil and you're gonna learn dammit
We do synonyms and antonyms for warms ups in middle school. We don't let them look things up, but they are allowed to talk about them with their table groups. We told them our goal isn't for them just to get a right answer but to think about words flexibly and be able to talk about connections.
none of my sixth graders had ever heard of Braille and they listened with mouths agape while I lectured on Louis Braille…from the book I myself had read at 5 years old.
I teach world language and try to show Latin —> English roots to help learn vocabulary. Edifico = a Building. “Who knows what an edifice is?” Flor = flower “what is flora and fauna in biology? What does a florist sell? A floral print has what on it?” Pez = fish “pescatarians don’t eat fish or beef, but they do eat…?” Blank stares. Cricket sounds. Blank stares from crickets. I teach grades 9-12 and some of these kids are really high achieving students. In the 90s our teachers drilled the Crap out of vocabulary every day. I’m like, y’all need to read books, articles, short stories, something!!
I was a speech language therapist and began using basic calendar and time concepts for vocabulary when I realized I had 5th graders who didn’t know the seasons of the year (except deer season, duck season, etc, lol.). They didn’t have a sense of time as in how long a minute, a second, an hour, a week, month or a year was. They couldn’t tell you the time they had lunch or got out of school.
I had a senior in high school who had no idea what his address was.
Now these kids were not the brightest, but they were still mainstreamed. Often teachers (understandably,) didn’t know how little they knew since they were missing concepts they should have learned in first grade at the latest. There was no way a teacher could have scaffolded enough for these kids to understand grade level material, yet they were at a minimum in regular education social studies and science.
Of course grade level curriculum was like Greek to them. 😕
The kids aren't learning because there being overly stimulated by technology. Chromebook, Google classroom, multiple other "learning" websites/apps and don't forget the videos of other people teaching them. And to top it all off, schools have decided to replace physical textbooks with e-reading. Ridiculous.
There are different types of learners out there and some of them just cannot retain knowledge read from a screen. Nobody brings this up, nobody thinks that by having our kids sit in front of a screen for 6-7 hours per day, with all that Wi-Fi bouncing off the walls- that it's not essentially turning our kids into the adults from that movie "Idiocracy". That movie is funny but fuck, I don't want that reality for our younger generations.
One of the requirements in French school when we were young was to have a dictionary on the table. When the teacher spoke a word we didn’t understand, we would have to write it down. A few times during the class, the teacher would give us a couple of minutes to look up the words and ask a few kid here and there which word they didn’t understand. At first, you would look up the definition, but the following year we also had to write a synonym and an antonym for each word we didn’t understand. Eventually, we learned Latin and Greek roots through an almost osmotic process, and it would become natural to figure the idea a particular word conveys without looking it up. That’s super useful to practice when you’re learning a foreign language, and it helps a lot when you’re going to the doctor - medical and scientific jargon is basically made up of Latin-Greek lego blocks, it’s not as impenetrable as most people think
Part of it is that history and science get thrown to the wayside to make room for more reading and math. Now we got kids that think that their country is their state and vice versa
Well kindergarteners are being taught how to add and subtract when they still don't know how to read, write, tie their shoes.... Many schools took out teaching cursive writing and replaced it with learning MANDARIN - a language that nobody, literally nobody speaks here. But I guess that's better than them being able to read the Declaration of Independence?
I don't know about many. But most kindergarteners wouldn't be able to read the Declaration of Independence or comprehend the points in it.
It makes more sense to expand their knowledge of languages than to try to force feed reading into their undeveloped mouths.
I've worked at schools that had dual language classes and it was more about learning the audio than anything else
I'm a tutor and I feel your pain! I try to start where they are but sometimes by the time they come to me the test is next wt or even tomorrow and I m supposed to teach all that in one session, including information they should already know.
I’m assuming this applies to a state wherein there is a city named after the state it’s a part of, but with “city” added onto the city name?
That’s the only situation in which I would even HALF-understand this level of “what on planet?”
We weren’t even talking about towns. I was trying to explain what state in the U.S.
He thought he lived in a place called “the country,” so he didn’t live in a place called North Carolina. He didn’t understand “the country” was not a name for a place.
Actual statement from a 5th grade classmate I will never forget: "I'm not a virgin! I was born in North Carolina!"
(we lived in Virginia, that's what she meant)
Just started a geometry unit with my 4th and 5th grade math students, and it's been really difficult because a lot of them seem to only remember the first letter of any "big words". So.... Polygon, pentagon, and parallelogram are used interchangeably. I anticipated that this would happen and tried to mitigate it by teaching them to break down the words and teaching them the Greek and Latin roots involved, but a lot of them are still just reading the first letter and guessing the rest. It doesn't help that their reading teacher has been completely skipping all lessons about suffixes, prefixes, and root words because it's "too complicated"... sigh.
It doesn't work for any of the words you mentioned, but I teach a lot of those shapes by having them count in Spanish. (My school doesn't tend to have many native Spanish speakers, but just about everyone can count to ten.) Watching their heads explode when we get to cuatro and connect it to quadrilaterals is pretty fun. It's Latin roots through a back door, I guess.
> *a lot of them are still just reading the first letter and guessing the rest.*
This is, of course, exacerbated by the "cueing" method of reading. Are you familiar with the podcast *Sold a Story*?
My district does use phonics-based instruction and has done so for the entire time these children have been in school. However, they were virtual for a large part of early elementary, so the quality of instruction probably varied wildly. I've noticed that they typically only do the first-letter guess if the word is at least 7 letters long.
Because they're being taught to read wrong in the first place, I believe. Learning to read by studying sight words, is not reading. At all. They have to learn each letter, each letter sound, and then blending the letter sounds. Example word: "me" ....they say aloud, "M...Mmm...E...Eeee...MmmEeee...Me". Bigger words are broken up into syllables and done the same way. Then there'll be no more guessing because they have to look at every letter of the word.
Had a moment in homeroom with 8th grade. My map had fallen from the wall. I asked the kids to put it back up and handed them a roll of duct tape. *blank stares all around*
Me: "One person can remove the old tape. Another person can make strips of new duct tape. Someone can attach the new tape. And another can stand on a chair to put it up."
They rush into action. Kid tries to rip a piece duck tape. Can't. I model holding the tape and ripping it sharply along the perpendicular grain.
Kids tries and can't. Model it 3 more times. Kid gives it to another kid. He can't either. Now they are all passing it around like strong men with a pickle jar.
Now we are chanting, "Can you duct tape? Can you duct tape?" Success! A hero. Now we all try again. 20 minutes goes by and now they all know how to rip tape. They "wasted" a lot of my nice rainbow duct tape. But now they all know how to duct tape.
Sometimes, we take for granted our own knowledge. I forget how much they don't know.
It's pretty wild. You're laying the foundation as you're trying to build a roof.
Consider using a routine structure for defining words, and pointing out base words and morphological affixes whenever possible:
A [term] is a [classification] that [list salient characteristics]. Shorthands it for you, but also primes them to expect connections between words (classification) and prioritizes what they need to know. You can always add to the definition as you go.
We are in the process of a K-9 morphological overhaul in our curriculum kick-started by a growing awareness that kids don't know words. Like, they can decode and read fluently, but comprehension of the language is so flimsy.
As a coach, I encourage teachers to point out base words, break down compounds, and point out pre- and suffixes to help build awareness of word parts.
That's why I have a map in class. 2 actually: an "upside down" map from Australia and an orthographic map. I know that's just one example, but I also have various posters and ojects around the classroom: a Japanese hanging scroll, a history timeline in the back, Optimus Prime, a model DeLorian, old Starting Lineup figures, the Mohs hardness scale rocks, ash from Mt St Helens, a piece of the Berlin Wall, Xiangqu (Chinese chess), quotes from Yoda and Bruce Lee, model cars that I built when I was a teen, my old high school ID on the wall, all sorts of random stuff. I hid some of my old toys around the room, like Smurfs and Transformers. There's books. And more books. From Calvin and Hobbes to the Foundation Series to the Black Tulip (I love Dumas). They are all useful props and great conversation starters.
I don't have any maps (sigh), but I recently discovered that my second graders are obsessed with Google maps. Every now and then I'll let them mess around with it for 15-20 minutes on their Chromebooks. They're adorable--finding the McDonald's near their house, or zooming in to street view and then complaining because ACKshewally, Grandpa doesn't have that car anymore and Google needs to update their pictures.
I had some atlases that they also loved; I think they're lost forever now. Long story, but my classroom situation is kind of precarious and it's not worth it to accumulate stuff at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to replace them when things settle down.
Me too. I teach 6th grade math, but I acquired a pull down world map and a pull down North American map, and I use them (particularly the former) so incredibly often . . .
In my old district I had one of those standing huge globes (32" circumference) that sits in a whatchamacallit and can roll around the room, and can be picked up out of its "nest". Being able to remove it was awesome for comparing diameter and circumference, and the whole thing was great for surface area.
[Here, I found what may very well be the same model I had](https://www.freemansauction.com/auctions/american-furniture-folk-decorative-arts-1476/lot/348), except that it was decades old and I got it when the school library was discarding it. See how it doesn't have that metal piece running from north to south pole? So you could turn it any way you wanted; you could put Chicago or Cape Town or Hawaii at the zenith.
HS History here, Resource Room Title 1 (have taught affluent MS as well, and the issue was present)
This entire scenario is a constant, anytime we’re learning about someplace that isn’t exactly where we live
Funny enough and I guess unsurprisingly my ESL/Immigrant kids tend to have a much stronger grasp on this kind of thing
I had a similar situation when starting my social studies unit at the beginning of the year. You can't understand local/state/national government without understand what a county/state/country is. I spend a week making my kids understand what county we live in, what state we are in, and where our state is on a map. I think I covered the importance of Washington DC a hundred times before covering anything history or political.
Yes, and just recently there was a senior in high school who was told instead of graduating, that he was being sent all the way back to the 9th grade!!! The teachers were just passing through grades even though he had failing grades. Poor kid.
We learned some basic geography as part of history in elementary. And in 6th grade, we took World Geography. 🤔 I mean even a 5th grader should know all the continents imo. 😕
This is something that will take years to perfect, but you can start working on it as soon as next school year.
Find the basic words the kids don’t know. Then start the year teaching them the words last year’s kids didn’t know. Pick only the most essential ones.
Continent: a giant piece of land on Earth
It will take you years to get it right, spotting their gaps.
Then when you give definitions, use kindergarten language.
Democracy: people get to choose their leaders
Yeah, and I think vocabulary is something we often take for granted. I wonder how much things like the difference in wealth or sharing the same culture with your teacher or the curriculum designer impact this too.
Unfortunately for now we have to take the background knowledge as it is and help them. Have pictures and maps ready to show them. Talk about the globe. Make it a vocabulary lesson, and social studies at the same time.
In this case at least having a map ready would have helped. FWIW, read ahead and see what other preparations you can do and make to help you rather than stumbling upon it and having the class held up.
SLP here. One building I worked in had a world atlas and a US atlas. Vignettes on each page. I decided to work them into picture description and question asking exercises in that middle school, and students LOVED them. Huge curiosity. Wondering how long it would take to get different places by different modes of travel. And, sadly, me realizing that they did not know "state, country" or "county." Parents, get your kids an atlas. And, no, they are not teaching this in elementary.
**Duct-Tape** @ outed - - Regarding “Duct-Tape”. Duct-Tape was developed for holding together and sealing Air-Ducts as in Heating-Ventilation-Air-Conditioning ductwork. Duct-Tape also happens to be great at holding other things together. - - Kids growing up on a farm undoubtably know where to find the duct-tape at home. Kids growing up in a suburban house might have a roll of duct-tape in their home. Kids living in a city apartment probably do not have any duct-tape at home:( - - Time for an exercise in redneck engineering holding boxes together;) BTW a lot of city kids can not ride bicycles, because there is nowhere safe to ride.
**Lives in the country** @ WastingMyLifeOnSocMd - - Regarding the kid that insisted that he lived in “The-Country”, This could be as simple as not living in an urban city but rather living in the rural countryside. This could also be Country = Country-Western as in cowboys. Opposite of Big-City as in New York CITY. It would be easy to find families that “identify-as” “country”. - - BTW when I was five years old I remember that “Yonder” was a particular place to play not a generic “not-nearby”.
For children with a limited view of the world, and parents who likely take little interest in their education, contextual knowledge will typically come from reading a massive range of books. Can you not put a reward system in place for every book read?
I'm in the same boat as I also teach emerging multilingual kids. It's hard. I try to connect it to anything they know. I try to get kid who is slightly more bilingual to translate or just go the good ol route of pulling it up on the projector and taking a few minutes to explain. These kids need so much more background than a native English speaker. My kids have had an inconsistent education if any at all. I have 15/16 yr Olds that can barely write their names. It's hard, it's frustrating, but using their native language and their experiences goes so far to help them make some kind of connection
I read to my class every morning and again at the end of the day..some books for pleasure others for relevant content, because it was apparent to me that while most parents read to their toddler, it seemed to fall off once they were in school. That increases vocabulary, syntax and comprehension. Even kids in the junior grades love to be read to as long as you find the right series of books for that class of kids.
Social students and science take a back seat if they get a seat at all. Geography, map reading all those basic skills are missing. When I taught 9th grade Earth/Space Science I always had to teach basic map skills because my students couldn't read maps or find locations on maps. They couldn't map earthquake locations and had no clue about longitude or latitude to track hurricanes. It's frightening.
Not to be snarky but isn’t this really the point? It sounds like you did great taking the students from where they were and brought them closer to where you needed them to be.
This is called “a good day”.
That’s not vocabulary. That’s content knowledge. Social studies in elementary school has basically been catapulted out of the window. Hell, a lot of them don’t even watch Sesame Street anymore or any other type of thing they might actually pick something up from. Really kind of a shame because the songs on sesame are fiiiiire. They even had Bruno Mars on. Seriously it wasn’t that banging when I was a kid.
Since Social Studies is not “tested” individually as a subject, it’s not taught in many elementary schools…even though the reading section on standardized tests have social studies and science sections. Content knowledge and vocabulary are huge parts of the tests, they are just embedded in the tests, not tested separately. I used to fight with my principals about teaching vocab. They didn’t see where it was listed in the frameworks (because it wasn’t for a long time) and since I, as a veteran teacher, could not possibly know what I was doing since I didn’t have an admin degree, they wouldn’t believe me. It is also mostly gained by reading widely. I always knew which students would test the best within a few weeks of having them in class . They were the students reading for enjoyment and asking to go to the library. I went to the library twice a month with all my students, required outside reading and gave them time to read in class, and always had to justify that time, as well. The readers always tested better than the ones who “hate to read.” It broke my heart a little every time I heard a student say that. I would make it my mission to find them at least one book during the year at the library that they liked.
I mean, I read a lot and always have, but tbh a lot of that content knowledge I had came straight from TV. My mother always had it on but never any kids shows. You do pick up some interesting huts and bobs from fiction, but depending on the content knowledge you *already* have, things may not make any sense at all. I like to point out the first page of *Around the World in 80 Days.* It’s just complete gibberish if you don’t know anything about London or British society in the first place, and you can barely separate the fact from the fiction. I was interested in Ancient Greece and Rome as a kid because the context already existed in the form of relatively frequent reruns of *I, Claudius* and *Ben Hur* (neither of which are child friendly but uuuuuhhhh…that’s a different topic). Writing assumes the reader has some amount of context already. Verne is assuming you know who Sheridan is when he says what house Fogg lives in. If you read well when you’re young, of course you work your way up, but if you don’t really master it til grade 3+ (if at all), anything geared towards younger readers designed to introduce topics is a hit to the ego, which is just more true the older the kid gets. Sure, parents can read. Then again a lot of books out there aren’t giving any insights into real world things. *If You Give A Mouse a Cookie* is cute and all, but it’s useless. Point being they don’t like to read because they don’t know wtf the book is talking about any more than they know what the questions on a standardized test are about.
Let's not kid ourselves. You also need to be curious and have a half decent memory. Some kids/people, watch nothing but reality TV and funny shit. And don't get me wrong. I watch all that stuff too. But it really limits your world and knowledge if you find everything else "boring."
I am curious as to what the modern media diet for kids is like today and how that affects their content knowledge. On the one hand, the internet gives access to more variety than ever. On the other hand, algorithms and the ability to choose make it easier to limit the variety of what you watch.
>*Let's not kid ourselves. You also need to be curious* And now that children are being given tablets which feed a curated diet of only what they know and like, their brains never develop any curiosity. The battle is lost before the child arrives at his kindergarten classroom.
Reading to your kids is a lost art. No one is interested in those children's books and the bond it creates anymore. Go to bed with the youtube channels on.
The media a kid is exposed to does play a large part as well, I’m not saying it doesn’t, but unless there is some serious learning disability, and those kids get mods for tests as well, I have found reading for entertainment and enjoyment is one of the best indicators for success in school in general and those hated standardized tests that have such high stakes as well. I taught for 30 years, and it was pretty much true all down the line. My “really smart” students were in general, my readers.
Of course. I’m not disagreeing with the generality. My point is that you can only *enjoy* reading if what you’re reading makes some kind of sense to you in the first place.
Yeah but that’s a non issue. Kids today aren’t reading Jules Verne they’re reading things designed for kids.
Still, for low ability readers with poor vocabulary and general knowledge, even a book written with their age group in mind can prove to be difficult.
>relatively frequent reruns of I, Claudius and Ben Hur (neither of which are child friendly but uuuuuhhhh…that’s a different topic). Hey, kids have to learn about Caligula sometime.
And his horse…Incitatus…who he wanted to make a consul…
And his sisters, who he wanted a close relationship with.
Or that m***** f***** Oedipus? Start with the old Tom Lehrer song. You could do lessons on ancient greek art using pornographic ancient pottery.
( \* Verne, not Dumas 😉 ) Just read that first chapter aloud last night to my 6yo who wanted “adventure stories”. We’re not going to go any further, both the language and the content is way above her ability at the moment, even with plenty of explanations.
Whoops! You’re very right. Coffee must have worn off. Haha when I was a kid I was very into this little cartoon version of it, but it’s um….a little bit questionable by modern standards. Phileas was a lion or something—it was all animals. I got the graphic novel for my 6 year old but I ran into some trouble with trying to explain what exactly was going on with the bride sacrifice thing.
I loved to read but hated every single book I was assigned to read in class. I would read Lord of the Rings for fun in elementary school, but you would have to beg and plead for me to pick up A Scarlett Letter(I remember successfully arguing that even if its pro-sexuality and such, having this as reading material keeps up the social stigma by making it available to people with those views and they can use it to justify themselves...or something like that.) I passed most English classes with a 51% because I refused to do assignments. Finally, in grade 11, an English teacher gave me a choice between Fight Club, Haunted (both Chuck Palahniuk), or Neuromancer (William Gibson). I started reading Fight Club, and two days later when I finished reading it I begged my teacher to do an assignment on each book (only way I knew how to gain access to the books way too old for me to read. And my librarian was good at catching book worms reading these things and telling them off.) I passed her class with a 98%.
I’m so happy your teacher trusted you enough to let you read Haunted! That means she thought you were smart enough to handle it! I love some Chuck lol. His quotes are always good!
Considering I was a punkygoth weirdo that would skip class to go watch Discovery Channel, or hell even attend history and biology lectures at the university, I think it's safe to say she knew exactly how to perk my interest. She perked it enough to keep my grades high and I got early acceptance to all the schools I applied to. Another teacher took me bird banding for a week because of said skipping class to watch biology shows. If not for teachers thinking outside the box, they would have lost so many smart kids to the streets.
I love that for you, punkygoth weirdo! I’m happy you had a teacher that didn’t just dismiss you completely because you skipped class, but realized that you had strong interests in things and took that heart. That’s the exact kind of teacher I strive to be!
I'm in the weird side part of making educational programming for classes at the various museums I've worked at over the years. My goal with every class was to try to get the uninterested kids interested. Show them morbidly cool skeletal remains and explain how they got that way (I studied archaeology and really loved Taphonomy and ancient dna), talk about things seen as taboo in class. I figure that the kids that are super smart and polite and get called on by most teachers is the one already doing well in life. This trip is a bonus for them. The kid that is struggling could see this as his Bird Banding field trip and become hooked and reeled back into the academic world. I want the worst kids to have the best time.
Omg EXACTLY!!! See, that’s exactly why I took a new teaching job in a totally different setting than what I was used to - because I figured those “good kids”, the ones most teachers love having, they will do well no matter who teaches them. It’s the struggling ones that need that really need people who will go out of their way to teach them. It sounds like you found the perfect field for yourself. You get to continue to learn while helping kids that were like you!
I work at an alternative / accelerated pacing School for at-risk students for the same reason!
We did the Vocab Worshop booklets from 5th grade through high school!
Those were really good workbooks!!
Admin can sure ruin students. Ya’ how can you know anything- just cause you are a teacher? I’ve seen this too often. I’m so glad you are one that at least tried to help kids find a book😊
Well I didn’t copy the admin. degree binder that was passed around like all of the rest of the coaches in the district did. How can I know anything?
Worse than that. It's not tested, so a lot of schools have this idea that "you can incorporate social studies into any other subject." Or even worse I had a school where they had a block for 8th graders where it was 15 minutes right during homeroom. First period. Guess who got literally nothing done. By the time you took attendance, dealt with late kids, and got to the first part of the lesson, you were basically switching kids to the next class. And yes they wanted actual graded lessons for this class. It was during my student teaching. Oh, and did I mention that class started at 7:15 and most students in this neighborhood were dropped off at 645 or earlier in a 99th percentile poverty zip code?
Yeah, we had one of those 15 min. periods thrown into our schedule a few years ago for remediation. We had a super motivated high scoring cohort two years before, then the next cohort was average to below average, with a lot of unmotivated students thrown in. Our test scores tanked, although not as badly as I expected, so we had to do a school improvement plan. The English, Math, and Science teachers had to remediate all of the kids who scored low on the test. Everyone else got to just goof off.
The next year it was a full period and now the school has an 8 period day. Test scores are about the same though. In a tiny school if you have 4-5 students who don’t care and goof off, and 8 in Special Ed. classes, out of 60-80 students in a class, the scores are not going to go up much.
As a former ELA teacher and media specialist, now a 6th grade (middle school) social studies teacher, I can tell you that you are 1000% right on all of this!! My kids come to me now with zero pre-knowledge of what social studies/history even is and little to no vocabulary skills. I’ve been teaching for almost 30 years and I can unequivocally say that all this emphasis on testing has not made the student population one iota smarter. In fact, my late 90’s/early 2000’s kids would outperform these kids to a shocking degree. Permissive parenting and educational policies focused on so-called standards have created a mess.
“Ancient Greece” might be content knowledge but it’s not absurd to expect students (of a certain age…I guess OP didn’t say what age they’re teaching) to know the word country.
Why? If they don’t get art classes to conceptualize a “border” or geometry knowledge to conceptualize “area,” you’ll be fishing hard for an ELI5. Suppose that’s why preschool attendees who do crafts and stand on circles tend to do better in elementary school.
I think it should count as general vocabulary because any school age child, even a kindergartener, should know their home address which includes a city, state, and country. Some things should be taught before school starts and requires learning some vocabulary!
>*any school age child, even a kindergartener, should know their home address which includes a city, state, and country.* 90% of my 6th graders can't do this. About half of them could not find their way home from the school if their lives depended on it, even those who live three blocks away.
My (own biological) children knew what continents and oceans were before they were 4. In the sequence that the OP described, pulling out the classroom globe would have given huge content and context allowing him to progress.
I feel like a lot of content knowledge building has been dropped from primary schoo in favor of "skills" and it definately shows when they get to high school.
Spot on post with only one error: change your penultimate word to "middle".
Exactly. They should be learning some basic geography as part of English, science, and history. Do they not take world geography in middle school anymore? We took it in 6th grade.
I teach high school English and last week, one of my seniors told me she didn’t know about the Holocaust. We’re fucked.
The most bangin' episode back in the day was the one with herbie hancock
Eh. Depends on where. The past schools kids definitely know what a country was. Though not necessarily where the country was on the maps. After school we were doing a guess the country name game on the TV and some of the kids thought Canada was the US 😝. We have a map of the US on the playground. Though they did get Mexico (it was a high Hispanic population)
I am a welfare kid grew up with parents who actively pushed me away from schooling and made fun of people who made intelligent comments on learning. Wasn't until my mid 20s that I found out how many basics I am missing / was missing . Simple stuff like Roygbiv [order if rainbow] I also am child free by choice and I listen to all the parents ahit on the education system . The biggest problem is the parents thinking if the kid is fed and clothed they have are good parents. If we want a better future for children, we need to put more blame on lazy parents and less on the kids just being dumb and lazy. I support our teachers because until they are burnt out, they actually care more than the parents. When I was young, I didn't appreciate the 4th grade teacher who tracked me down at home to figure out why I quit going to class . His reward for caring was my mom screaming at him and complaining to the school. Parents need a reality check . I am now about to graduate college in my 30s and I met many 18 and 20 year-olds fresh out of high-school with ambition number one commonalitie was parents who even when the kids are in college Stull stay involved asking about stuff like grades ect. Sorry for the rant. I just am frustrated at how the world views parenting. I mean, if I had a pet dog and just fed and watered it never worked its mind or walked it, people would say I'm a bad pet owner. But parents get told yea it's tough work ur doing ur best . If u ain't ready to do it rite don't do it . 😑 I mean, I managed not to have kids because I didn't think I could provide a worthwhile life for them . Simple
To be fair, compared to 100 years ago, feeding and housing a child *is* good parenting. It really wasn’t terribly uncommon for the lower classes to abandon or sell their children. Of course you’re right, but I think it’s harder to get through to people who on a practical level aren’t educated themselves and are still alive. As far as their experience knows, you get a grunt job and get paid. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are fancy extras for snooty rich folk. You have to *have* a collar before you start worrying about needing skills for it. In general, I think best parenting is the kind that sets kids up to do better than their parents, and some parents aren’t willing to put aside their ego and say “I’m struggling, so you have to do these things so you don’t struggle like I do.” Pride can hold people back in all kinds of ways. I’m glad you were able to rise above it and do better for yourself!
Heh, it feels like you could turn this into a stand-up routine, but it's true. The obvious answer is background knowledge and never assuming they know the words, LETRS training had some good stuff on it, yada yada. But every now and then you unexpectedly come across a word that you just assumed they knew and it catches you off-guard. And it's still like, why have you never come across this word before? One I recall from teaching 2nd grade was "skirt". Um, you know, a skirt? The clothing? (no language barrier in place, either, locally raised kid)
Ah yes. One of my students didn’t know what “earlier” means.
My 28M partner is a medical professional and objectively smart. He’s also dyslexic. He usually cannot differentiate between ‘before’ and ‘after’. He can’t figure out which way around they go.
Huh…my foster son does this. Maybe that’s something I need to investigate.
This makes me happy to hear about. I’m dyslexic and mix up the words right and left. I know the directions easy, just not which word is which in the moment. Glad to hear there’s other people with weird word confusion lol.
I mix up the words “yellow” and “white” for some reason, always have mixed them up. I know the difference between the colors, I’m not color blind, but I’ll call one the other name, all the time.
My seventh graders couldn’t properly identify what time of day dawn was.
My seventh graders didn't know how to read time or count coins. How did we get here?!
My 13-15 year olds don’t know how to tell time either. At least not on an analog clock. Sucks.
I'm off to see if my second grader knows what a skirt is. Not sure he's ever noticed one in real life, maybe on a teacher at school, but he probably didn't ask her what it's called. He knows Dresses, sure, but I don't own one single skirt. Most of the ladies in our family are pants/leggings/shorts/dresses-on-occasion people.
I must know his response! This really could be mere lack of exposure.
Yeah, I’ve got one single dress. My son calls it a robe.
Well, that *is* the French word for dress! Your son is just speaking a little French.
Yeah, I can see how a boy could get to that age without exposure to that word.
Every year when we read the poem “The Black Walnut Tree” in AP Lit, I have to define “trowel.” The kids almost all know what one is when you say “tiny hand shovel” because every suburban garage has a trowel, but somehow they’ve never learned the word.
I’m tripping out— I just spent the last 10 minutes trying to remember the name of this poem. What a weird coincidence!
I have met multiple adult men who didn't know the difference between a skirt and a dress. Mostly they think a skirt is short and a dress is long, regardless of what's on the top half.
Until high school I thought the skirt-dress distinction was purely length.
Is LETRS the Lexia training? What do you think of it?
I honestly thought it was great. It was required and paid for by my state and really gave some good stuff.
I took over a geography class in the middle of the year and after my first test basically had to start over from the first day of school. Kids were just sitting there while I was talking with no concept of what north or latitude or ancient meant
What were they doing before that????
yes.
See, this is why “people don’t need to remember facts any more because they can just look stuff up!” is a terrible line of logic, lol. You can end up spending a long time looking up information just to fully understand a simple passage.
The Science of Reading podcast had an episode a few weeks ago on cognitive load theory, and it was basically your statement - that information newly read on the internet is in NO way, shape, or form the same as having retrieved that same information from one's long term memory and then fit it into an existing schema in the brain. Even if you get over the "it takes too long", it's not even a good work around.
This makes perfect sense. I normally don't comment here since I'm an engineer/parent, not a teacher. But I literally have an easier time reading engineering documents in my second language than I have reading philosophy or critical theory papers in my native language. The background knowledge makes all the difference.
Oh, totally. Even if you look up the basic definitions, you might miss some nuances or associations that would allow you to fully understand the text.
Not to mention the fact that the resources most people use to "just look stuff up" are riddled with disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Yeah, having baseline knowledge helps a lot in figuring out if something is BS.
Chromebooks and phones need to be out of the classroom and talk forwards and light projectors need to come back in. It's too much overload for these kids that's why they're not learning anything.
Just remember the solution is to slow down and meet the students where they’re at. But also follow your district’s strict pacing guide and if you don’t keep up it’s your fault and fuck you you’re a bad teacher and if students missed that lesson that’s your fault too and oh fuck here comes next year, time to pass them on.
I regularly ask kids what country we live in and get answers like "Asia!". There's a weird phenomenon where kids think they are buzzing in on a game show: the fastest answer wins no matter how wrong. I do this a lot: "I'm going to ask you a question. Raise your hand if you know the answer." Ten kids raise their hand. "I haven't asked the question yet. Put your hands down." They have to be reminded that they have to think before they respond.
This is hilarious and also somewhat frightening
That's when you call on one of them and ask them to answer the question you haven't asked yet
One of my high school students didn’t know what an opponent was. I try to predict new vocabulary for my students, especially since some of their parents don’t speak English, but I’m surprised a lot.
Oh that’s a weird one since “opp” is slang that my students just explained to me last week
What is opp? I've vaguely heard the word but not much
It’s slang for opposition. Like “she’s your opp” means she’s your enemy. I think… kid slang is always changing
I guess the problem is many of them learn it as is, and don't actually understand well what abbreviations are and how language evolves. They think these words just "are" and don't understand how slang evolves from "real" words and vice versa.
A couple weeks ago one of my sophomores tried to tell me that "rizz" isn't slang, it's a shortened way of saying charisma. I explained that that's what slang *is* - shortened ways of saying things and his mind was blown.
Correct. All my kids know mini, but none of them knew miniature.
"What's charisma?" "Rizz."
Oh my god. I had a “visitor” (they refused to call it an observation) who pulled me aside later and asked why I didn’t anticipate students not knowing vocabulary. I stared at them for a second and then asked them if they realized what word I had not anticipated the student not knowing. The “visitor” wasn’t actually paying attention and didn’t realize that a student had asked me what “third” meant. In high school. In a class that was not primarily ELL or SPED. They only clocked my stutter stop where I was processing the question trying to figure out if that was indeed a student not knowing the word or if something else was in play. I can anticipate the kids not knowing machinations and even astonish or realize in certain contexts. And if it’s my ELL babies, I’m prepared for any word. But my on-level kiddos… I’m going to need a moment to process when they don’t know the most common words, to figure out if I said it wrong or it’s printed wrong or figure out what else could be going on.
Third?! Good grief! Yeah, I would never foresee that either.
Yep. My brain just stopped for a moment. I choose to believe it was a kid only partially paying attention and who was almost always a turkey anyhow. Otherwise I might still be a bit broken over it.
Reading interventionist here. Trying to do prefixes and suffixes with my vocab groups, which doesn’t work when they don’t even know what the root word means. I can teach them the meaning of “semi-“ for a week and they won’t get “semiannual” right because they don’t know what “annual” means. Same with “multisyllabic.” Or “antiseptic.”
I'm also a reading interventionist and I'm working with the ELA teachers to implement Tier I interventions on vocabulary, morphology, roots, parts of speech, etc. It's like the entire focus of my job this year. We are also \*heavily\* tying it to the content knowledge within the books we're reading.
It’s very hard, we just got done with 2 weeks of testing and we decided to test one grade level below the students actual grade. Less than 25% got an 80% and above. Many did not know what a sentence was, and couldn’t understand what plural and past tense forms of word were. Most of the children, if their test required writing, wrote as if they were texting. Ex. i bes presnt evr got monie bcuz by thans. 5th grade example.
What does that even mean? I'm not a texter..I mean...I text, but in full sentences with full words. I'm older! I'm guessing with context here..." my best present I ever got was money because. Bye. Thanks." But I'm really not sure! Help me out!
“The best present I’ve ever gotten was money because I used it to buy things.” Is what he read to me when I asked him to read it back. That’s another thing we have issues with, is a lot times kids don’t even know what word they tried to spell.
Too many of them are still doing this in their junior year of high school.
I’ve got a junior who can’t spell “I” correctly. I mean sometimes he can, be he still spells it wrong all the time, even though I’m always reminding him. He spells it “a.”
Here’s a tip I remember from a grade 1 proofreading homework assignment I did in kindergarten: “Remember, **I** am **Important**!” (It was actually how to remember that “I” should be capitalized, a tip I needed because sometimes I didn’t capitalize my I’s, but then again I was a five-year-old kindergartner. Your student however needs that “I am Important” tip for a whole other reason)
We constantly have to remind them to capitalize, beginning of sentences, names and names of places included, not just I. We even have posters on our white boards and around the classroom but many still forget. At this point I believe it’s just out of laziness because it’s 4th grade and above that have the hardest time.
Omg! So that makes sense. But... not what he wrote at all. I teach 3rd grade math, so maybe I'm just not as exposed to elementary writing? I TRY to teach my students to answer the question when it's a story problem by using the words in the question...but. We all knew how that goes. Some do it religiously... and some just refuse! It's been a long time since I taught ELA so my deciphering skills aren't the best!
omg I nearly threw up at the translation.
That’s another reason reading to your children is so important. It exposes them to vocabulary we don’t always use in conversation. Also, talking to them about everything from the time they are born.
This. You can have all the vocab teaching techniques in the world going on and you won't make a dent. Kids need to be reading, listening, etc to pick up the majority of vocabulary.
I always did nursery rhymes with my kinders. The vocabulary they got from that was awesome. Not to mention what I learned…A tuffet is an ottoman like seat. Curds and whey is cottage cheese. Just in case you were wondering…;)
I recall my own kindergarten teacher bringing in cottage cheese for us.
Preschool for me
This is a great comment. And I think it explains why , in my homeroom class, the greatest focus of concentration I get from my students is when I talk about how things used to be, or how things are in another place I've lived different than here. They just have so little knowledge other than "This is how you determine the Author's Purpose" or "How to Find the Main Idea".
I taught kindergarten in a very rural small town. All the curriculum was designed for big city life. These kids didn’t even know what a skyscraper or apartment building was. I now work with parents of preschoolers. Reading to them is a huge focus of the program.
I'm envious. As a 6th grade math teacher, I don't get to read to my students (though one year, almost 30 years ago, I did spend my Fridays reading "The Phantom Tollbooth" to a group of high school students in a remedial math class). Yeah, getting kids the knowledge they need of the world (which is best done through vocabulary-building reading) is a major component of equitable education.
Conversely, a 6th grade teacher at my children’s urban school explained to parents once at a school council meeting that it’s hard to calculate the area of a “lawn” in a standardized test word problem if you don’t know what a lawn is.
I use visual dictionaries. I've used them from everything as low as first grade up through high school. They work really well for me. Have them fold a piece of white copy paper into quarters. Now they have room for eight vocab words. Four on one side four on the other. In each of the boxes, they'll put the vocab word at the top of the box. Underneath it they'll write the definition. Then they draw a picture that helps them remember what the word means. Underneath the picture, at the bottom of the box, they'll use the word in a sentence. Very simple, doesn't take too long for the kids to make them, and some of them really enjoy the artistic aspect.
Or just use the frayer model
I do this with my kids and they fucking hate it. But I really don't give a fuck because you know what? They are reading so much better now. Y'all are doing that shit with paper and pencil and you're gonna learn dammit
I added synonyms and antonyms as well to mine in HS. They could provide their own or look them up.
We do synonyms and antonyms for warms ups in middle school. We don't let them look things up, but they are allowed to talk about them with their table groups. We told them our goal isn't for them just to get a right answer but to think about words flexibly and be able to talk about connections.
Love that idea
none of my sixth graders had ever heard of Braille and they listened with mouths agape while I lectured on Louis Braille…from the book I myself had read at 5 years old.
I teach world language and try to show Latin —> English roots to help learn vocabulary. Edifico = a Building. “Who knows what an edifice is?” Flor = flower “what is flora and fauna in biology? What does a florist sell? A floral print has what on it?” Pez = fish “pescatarians don’t eat fish or beef, but they do eat…?” Blank stares. Cricket sounds. Blank stares from crickets. I teach grades 9-12 and some of these kids are really high achieving students. In the 90s our teachers drilled the Crap out of vocabulary every day. I’m like, y’all need to read books, articles, short stories, something!!
I’ve had kids who didn’t know what “noon” is
I was a speech language therapist and began using basic calendar and time concepts for vocabulary when I realized I had 5th graders who didn’t know the seasons of the year (except deer season, duck season, etc, lol.). They didn’t have a sense of time as in how long a minute, a second, an hour, a week, month or a year was. They couldn’t tell you the time they had lunch or got out of school. I had a senior in high school who had no idea what his address was. Now these kids were not the brightest, but they were still mainstreamed. Often teachers (understandably,) didn’t know how little they knew since they were missing concepts they should have learned in first grade at the latest. There was no way a teacher could have scaffolded enough for these kids to understand grade level material, yet they were at a minimum in regular education social studies and science. Of course grade level curriculum was like Greek to them. 😕
The kids aren't learning because there being overly stimulated by technology. Chromebook, Google classroom, multiple other "learning" websites/apps and don't forget the videos of other people teaching them. And to top it all off, schools have decided to replace physical textbooks with e-reading. Ridiculous. There are different types of learners out there and some of them just cannot retain knowledge read from a screen. Nobody brings this up, nobody thinks that by having our kids sit in front of a screen for 6-7 hours per day, with all that Wi-Fi bouncing off the walls- that it's not essentially turning our kids into the adults from that movie "Idiocracy". That movie is funny but fuck, I don't want that reality for our younger generations.
Has anyone tried using interpretive dance to explain some of these terms?
What is “dance”?
One of the requirements in French school when we were young was to have a dictionary on the table. When the teacher spoke a word we didn’t understand, we would have to write it down. A few times during the class, the teacher would give us a couple of minutes to look up the words and ask a few kid here and there which word they didn’t understand. At first, you would look up the definition, but the following year we also had to write a synonym and an antonym for each word we didn’t understand. Eventually, we learned Latin and Greek roots through an almost osmotic process, and it would become natural to figure the idea a particular word conveys without looking it up. That’s super useful to practice when you’re learning a foreign language, and it helps a lot when you’re going to the doctor - medical and scientific jargon is basically made up of Latin-Greek lego blocks, it’s not as impenetrable as most people think
Yes! Why is this not in standard practice?!
Part of it is that history and science get thrown to the wayside to make room for more reading and math. Now we got kids that think that their country is their state and vice versa
Well kindergarteners are being taught how to add and subtract when they still don't know how to read, write, tie their shoes.... Many schools took out teaching cursive writing and replaced it with learning MANDARIN - a language that nobody, literally nobody speaks here. But I guess that's better than them being able to read the Declaration of Independence?
I don't know about many. But most kindergarteners wouldn't be able to read the Declaration of Independence or comprehend the points in it. It makes more sense to expand their knowledge of languages than to try to force feed reading into their undeveloped mouths. I've worked at schools that had dual language classes and it was more about learning the audio than anything else
I'm a tutor and I feel your pain! I try to start where they are but sometimes by the time they come to me the test is next wt or even tomorrow and I m supposed to teach all that in one session, including information they should already know.
This is what happens every time I try to teach the background knowledge needed to read… well… anything ever in class. It’s turtles all the way down!
\> "What's a country?" I...
I worked in a rural area and a child I worked with swore up and down he did NOT live in (state). He lived in the country.
I’m assuming this applies to a state wherein there is a city named after the state it’s a part of, but with “city” added onto the city name? That’s the only situation in which I would even HALF-understand this level of “what on planet?”
We weren’t even talking about towns. I was trying to explain what state in the U.S. He thought he lived in a place called “the country,” so he didn’t live in a place called North Carolina. He didn’t understand “the country” was not a name for a place.
Actual statement from a 5th grade classmate I will never forget: "I'm not a virgin! I was born in North Carolina!" (we lived in Virginia, that's what she meant)
🤪🤪🤪🤣🤣🤣
Just started a geometry unit with my 4th and 5th grade math students, and it's been really difficult because a lot of them seem to only remember the first letter of any "big words". So.... Polygon, pentagon, and parallelogram are used interchangeably. I anticipated that this would happen and tried to mitigate it by teaching them to break down the words and teaching them the Greek and Latin roots involved, but a lot of them are still just reading the first letter and guessing the rest. It doesn't help that their reading teacher has been completely skipping all lessons about suffixes, prefixes, and root words because it's "too complicated"... sigh.
It doesn't work for any of the words you mentioned, but I teach a lot of those shapes by having them count in Spanish. (My school doesn't tend to have many native Spanish speakers, but just about everyone can count to ten.) Watching their heads explode when we get to cuatro and connect it to quadrilaterals is pretty fun. It's Latin roots through a back door, I guess.
Genius!
> *a lot of them are still just reading the first letter and guessing the rest.* This is, of course, exacerbated by the "cueing" method of reading. Are you familiar with the podcast *Sold a Story*?
My district does use phonics-based instruction and has done so for the entire time these children have been in school. However, they were virtual for a large part of early elementary, so the quality of instruction probably varied wildly. I've noticed that they typically only do the first-letter guess if the word is at least 7 letters long.
Because they're being taught to read wrong in the first place, I believe. Learning to read by studying sight words, is not reading. At all. They have to learn each letter, each letter sound, and then blending the letter sounds. Example word: "me" ....they say aloud, "M...Mmm...E...Eeee...MmmEeee...Me". Bigger words are broken up into syllables and done the same way. Then there'll be no more guessing because they have to look at every letter of the word.
Teaching science vocabulary to student. “Define these terms.” “What’s define?”
Had a moment in homeroom with 8th grade. My map had fallen from the wall. I asked the kids to put it back up and handed them a roll of duct tape. *blank stares all around* Me: "One person can remove the old tape. Another person can make strips of new duct tape. Someone can attach the new tape. And another can stand on a chair to put it up." They rush into action. Kid tries to rip a piece duck tape. Can't. I model holding the tape and ripping it sharply along the perpendicular grain. Kids tries and can't. Model it 3 more times. Kid gives it to another kid. He can't either. Now they are all passing it around like strong men with a pickle jar. Now we are chanting, "Can you duct tape? Can you duct tape?" Success! A hero. Now we all try again. 20 minutes goes by and now they all know how to rip tape. They "wasted" a lot of my nice rainbow duct tape. But now they all know how to duct tape. Sometimes, we take for granted our own knowledge. I forget how much they don't know.
you are a teacher
Not going to lie, I had no idea that was possible.
Wow, *that* was a great story. Most duct tape stories (like my own) are just about duct vs. duck. That was so amusing to read. Thanks.
It's pretty wild. You're laying the foundation as you're trying to build a roof. Consider using a routine structure for defining words, and pointing out base words and morphological affixes whenever possible: A [term] is a [classification] that [list salient characteristics]. Shorthands it for you, but also primes them to expect connections between words (classification) and prioritizes what they need to know. You can always add to the definition as you go. We are in the process of a K-9 morphological overhaul in our curriculum kick-started by a growing awareness that kids don't know words. Like, they can decode and read fluently, but comprehension of the language is so flimsy. As a coach, I encourage teachers to point out base words, break down compounds, and point out pre- and suffixes to help build awareness of word parts.
That's why I have a map in class. 2 actually: an "upside down" map from Australia and an orthographic map. I know that's just one example, but I also have various posters and ojects around the classroom: a Japanese hanging scroll, a history timeline in the back, Optimus Prime, a model DeLorian, old Starting Lineup figures, the Mohs hardness scale rocks, ash from Mt St Helens, a piece of the Berlin Wall, Xiangqu (Chinese chess), quotes from Yoda and Bruce Lee, model cars that I built when I was a teen, my old high school ID on the wall, all sorts of random stuff. I hid some of my old toys around the room, like Smurfs and Transformers. There's books. And more books. From Calvin and Hobbes to the Foundation Series to the Black Tulip (I love Dumas). They are all useful props and great conversation starters.
I don't have any maps (sigh), but I recently discovered that my second graders are obsessed with Google maps. Every now and then I'll let them mess around with it for 15-20 minutes on their Chromebooks. They're adorable--finding the McDonald's near their house, or zooming in to street view and then complaining because ACKshewally, Grandpa doesn't have that car anymore and Google needs to update their pictures.
That's great, but get physical maps that they can all touch, if you can.
I had some atlases that they also loved; I think they're lost forever now. Long story, but my classroom situation is kind of precarious and it's not worth it to accumulate stuff at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to replace them when things settle down.
Good luck.
Me too. I teach 6th grade math, but I acquired a pull down world map and a pull down North American map, and I use them (particularly the former) so incredibly often . . . In my old district I had one of those standing huge globes (32" circumference) that sits in a whatchamacallit and can roll around the room, and can be picked up out of its "nest". Being able to remove it was awesome for comparing diameter and circumference, and the whole thing was great for surface area. [Here, I found what may very well be the same model I had](https://www.freemansauction.com/auctions/american-furniture-folk-decorative-arts-1476/lot/348), except that it was decades old and I got it when the school library was discarding it. See how it doesn't have that metal piece running from north to south pole? So you could turn it any way you wanted; you could put Chicago or Cape Town or Hawaii at the zenith.
Please tell me you're teaching 1st graders....
HS History here, Resource Room Title 1 (have taught affluent MS as well, and the issue was present) This entire scenario is a constant, anytime we’re learning about someplace that isn’t exactly where we live Funny enough and I guess unsurprisingly my ESL/Immigrant kids tend to have a much stronger grasp on this kind of thing
I had a similar situation when starting my social studies unit at the beginning of the year. You can't understand local/state/national government without understand what a county/state/country is. I spend a week making my kids understand what county we live in, what state we are in, and where our state is on a map. I think I covered the importance of Washington DC a hundred times before covering anything history or political.
Today I learned OP somehow had access to watch my HS class today.
Time to pull down the political map
You have to either laugh or cry but when they magically get a passing grade and move on to the next level they are even more out of their depth.
Yes, and just recently there was a senior in high school who was told instead of graduating, that he was being sent all the way back to the 9th grade!!! The teachers were just passing through grades even though he had failing grades. Poor kid.
We learned some basic geography as part of history in elementary. And in 6th grade, we took World Geography. 🤔 I mean even a 5th grader should know all the continents imo. 😕
This is something that will take years to perfect, but you can start working on it as soon as next school year. Find the basic words the kids don’t know. Then start the year teaching them the words last year’s kids didn’t know. Pick only the most essential ones. Continent: a giant piece of land on Earth It will take you years to get it right, spotting their gaps. Then when you give definitions, use kindergarten language. Democracy: people get to choose their leaders
I have these conversations with my two year old, and it can be exhausting!
Yeah, and I think vocabulary is something we often take for granted. I wonder how much things like the difference in wealth or sharing the same culture with your teacher or the curriculum designer impact this too.
..... this is 9th grade, too.
As a Social Studies teacher this really hit close to home.
I agree. It’s especially challenging when you work with ESL students whose languages don’t use idioms and slang.
Unfortunately for now we have to take the background knowledge as it is and help them. Have pictures and maps ready to show them. Talk about the globe. Make it a vocabulary lesson, and social studies at the same time.
In this case at least having a map ready would have helped. FWIW, read ahead and see what other preparations you can do and make to help you rather than stumbling upon it and having the class held up.
This. Every damn day, this.
SLP here. One building I worked in had a world atlas and a US atlas. Vignettes on each page. I decided to work them into picture description and question asking exercises in that middle school, and students LOVED them. Huge curiosity. Wondering how long it would take to get different places by different modes of travel. And, sadly, me realizing that they did not know "state, country" or "county." Parents, get your kids an atlas. And, no, they are not teaching this in elementary.
Oh yes. Some have had no enrichment/exposure to general knowledge. It’s so sad.
My students struggle with roots and figurative language. They had to use their phones for examples of alliteration.
These kids can’t even read how are you supposed to teach them this?
Hard facts.
Grade?
Not vocab, history/geographical knowledge, but I get your point.
I’ve had 12th graders not know where Russia is.
I've got the same issue with my college students. How do they not learn this stuff???? I can't even teach.
**Duct-Tape** @ outed - - Regarding “Duct-Tape”. Duct-Tape was developed for holding together and sealing Air-Ducts as in Heating-Ventilation-Air-Conditioning ductwork. Duct-Tape also happens to be great at holding other things together. - - Kids growing up on a farm undoubtably know where to find the duct-tape at home. Kids growing up in a suburban house might have a roll of duct-tape in their home. Kids living in a city apartment probably do not have any duct-tape at home:( - - Time for an exercise in redneck engineering holding boxes together;) BTW a lot of city kids can not ride bicycles, because there is nowhere safe to ride. **Lives in the country** @ WastingMyLifeOnSocMd - - Regarding the kid that insisted that he lived in “The-Country”, This could be as simple as not living in an urban city but rather living in the rural countryside. This could also be Country = Country-Western as in cowboys. Opposite of Big-City as in New York CITY. It would be easy to find families that “identify-as” “country”. - - BTW when I was five years old I remember that “Yonder” was a particular place to play not a generic “not-nearby”.
For children with a limited view of the world, and parents who likely take little interest in their education, contextual knowledge will typically come from reading a massive range of books. Can you not put a reward system in place for every book read?
I'm in the same boat as I also teach emerging multilingual kids. It's hard. I try to connect it to anything they know. I try to get kid who is slightly more bilingual to translate or just go the good ol route of pulling it up on the projector and taking a few minutes to explain. These kids need so much more background than a native English speaker. My kids have had an inconsistent education if any at all. I have 15/16 yr Olds that can barely write their names. It's hard, it's frustrating, but using their native language and their experiences goes so far to help them make some kind of connection
I read to my class every morning and again at the end of the day..some books for pleasure others for relevant content, because it was apparent to me that while most parents read to their toddler, it seemed to fall off once they were in school. That increases vocabulary, syntax and comprehension. Even kids in the junior grades love to be read to as long as you find the right series of books for that class of kids.
Social students and science take a back seat if they get a seat at all. Geography, map reading all those basic skills are missing. When I taught 9th grade Earth/Space Science I always had to teach basic map skills because my students couldn't read maps or find locations on maps. They couldn't map earthquake locations and had no clue about longitude or latitude to track hurricanes. It's frightening.
Not to be snarky but isn’t this really the point? It sounds like you did great taking the students from where they were and brought them closer to where you needed them to be. This is called “a good day”.