Once students can master decoding, their vocabularies can blossom. In this episode of Literacy Talks, our trio of literacy experts tackles the challenges and joys of helping students build their vocabulary skills, along with the how’s and why’s of using the techniques of vocabulary-rich teaching.
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Once students can master decoding, their vocabularies can blossom. In this episode of Literacy Talks, our trio of literacy experts tackles the challenges and joys of helping students build their vocabulary skills, along with the how’s and why’s of using the techniques of vocabulary-rich teaching.
Subscribe to our Literacy Talks podcast digest and never miss an episode! We’ll send you summaries of every session, links to the resources discussed on each show, and some extra goodies so that your learning never stops.
Subscribe to our podcast digest.
Download the new Reading Horizons Discovery Product Guide.
Access the show notes.
Read the transcripts.
Hello literacy leaders and champions. Welcome to literacy talks, the podcast series from Reading Horizons dedicated to exploring the ideas, trends, insights and practical issues that will help us create literacy momentum. Our series host is Stacy Hurst, professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Officer at Reading Horizons where reading momentum begins. Joining Stacy are Donell Pons, a recognized expert in literacy and special education and Lindsay Kemeny, a Utah based elementary classroom teacher. Today's topic is vocabulary and where it fits into successful early literacy instruction. Let's get started.
Stacy Hurst:Welcome to this episode of Literacy Talks, I'm your host Stacy Hurst. And I'm joined every week by Donell Pons and Lindsay Kemeny. And how lucky are we to be here today, we have a really fun conversation topic that I think is relevant to everyone no matter what you're teaching, or what your interest in literacy is. And Lindsay chose our topic this week. So we'll just get started. Lindsay.
Lindsay Kemeny:Okay. So Stacy, I might embarrass you a little bit. But when I first met you, what we're talking about today is something that I noticed right off was kind of a talent of yours is that you have a very robust vocabulary. And I even like some of the words you use are, you know, not in my expressive vocabulary, but some of them aren't even in my receptive vocabulary. And so I would hear you say words, and, of course, you know, I didn't want to let you know, so I just kind of smile and nod like I know what you're talking about. And then later, I would look up a word. So, like, the word Shibboleth, I think you use that a couple times. I had to go look that up. Okay. I have a list, Stacy that I've written down, efficacious, pontificating, expeditious, acquiesced, cacophony. All of these and I want to know, how did you learn, you know, to have such a great vocabulary?
Stacy Hurst:Okay, I was muted for a lot of that. But I was laughing out loud, just so you know, listener. You know what I have to say, I represent what we know from the science of reading that the best way to increase your vocabulary is through reading. And clearly reading has been my jam ever since I could read. So we're talking about the age of four or five. But I also Lindsey, I was really relating what you're saying, because I've done that with people so many times before. I think it's just a word curiosity, right? Like I like words. And to be word consciousness is what we call it. But I do kind of have a funny story that will not make me look so good. But I wonder how much this contributed. When I was in junior high, middle school, junior high, we had a rule that you couldn't chew gum. If he got caught chewing gum, then you had to copy pages out of the dictionary. That was the consequence.
Lindsay Kemeny:So that's why
Stacy Hurst:I really think that is part of it. Because I chose to chew gum and pay the consequence of so I would, there were times that I would literally write pages ahead of time, because I knew that I was going to probably get, you know, asked to do that. So I think it's just yeah, and I know lots of other people with bigger vocabularies. So I'm flattered, Lindsay. But I just like words,
Lindsay Kemeny:Yes. Well, because of you, Stacy, I made a personal goal to improve my vocabulary. And so I started, you know, I found a website that emails me every day, a word of the day. And so I, you know, try to, you know, read that read the definition of that word, try to use it if I can. It was so fun. Because I got my students involved. I told my students how I'm trying to get a better vocabulary. And so then they were asking, what's the word of the day? What's the word of the day? And the first day I'm like, well, it's prosaic, and they're all you know, what's that? What's prosaic, and I said, Well, it's kind of when something's like the same every day, kind of dull, not very exciting. One of my students goes, oh, so like, school is prosaic? And I'm like, oh, no, no, not like that. Oh, and then I have another student that raises his hand and he says, You mean like Mrs. Kemeny's class is not prosaic? Yes, exactly. Um, so anyways, let's talk about this a little bit. Sometimes I have Have I hear, especially lower grade teachers talk about how they don't have time for vocabulary instruction, and how, you know, we really spend so much time on those lower strands of Scarborough's reading rope, decoding and phonemic awareness. And, of course, that's so important. But it's also really important that we don't neglect those upper strands of the rope. So, so let's talk a little bit about why vocabulary instruction is so important to teaching reading. Darnell, do you want to answer that question?
Donell Pons:Great question, Lindsey, I get one of those questions, awesome. Able to talk about my vocabulary,
Lindsay Kemeny:You have a great vocabulary too, Donell.
Donell Pons:No offense taken. You know, it's interesting, because I just thought back to when I was raising children, my mother was an educator too. So it's interesting, my introduction towards to language to reading was through my mother. And my mom was a voracious for lack of looking for another word, voracious reader. And I remember being just very little, when my mother would grab a what we call them garbage sacks, or really the grocery bag and you would fold them up, use them as a garbage sack, and we'd grab a couple of those and head down to the library, once a week, we would be there for hours, my mother would go to one section, we would go to another, you'd load up the bag, and then we would load take them home. And so that I had an early love of reading, reading and understanding words, they're just there's no division between the two. They're interconnected, right, the words on the page give meaning that's the whole point. Pictures oftentimes are helpful. And we talk a lot about using pictures as a bridge for older students to who are learning English as another language, perhaps you're using pictures as a bridge for language for a time. But really, the words carry the meaning. And that's where you're really going to get into the depth of a story. And you'll learn that quickly, pretty early on, you'll learn quickly that the picture is only giving you so much even little children start to learn very quickly that well, there's a whole lot more going on here, as they start to figure out what the words are telling them. And that's the importance of teaching vocabulary. To me, like Stacy said, they go hand in hand, if you like to read, then you're getting context. And that's another meaningful piece of vocabulary is when you're receiving context for words, then that's providing some sense of the meaning of a word. So all of these things we're going to be talking about, you can't really pull them apart too far, they really go together. And even teaching a student how to spell a word. There's meaning when you're teaching how to spell a word, I can't imagine learning to spell a word without knowing what it means they go that closely together. That's how I'm feeling anyway.
Lindsay Kemeny:Yeah, vocabulary and comprehension is so connected. You know, my third son has dyslexia. And so I'm a better decoder than he is. But when we sat down, this was probably last year in fifth grade, he's really interested in black holes. And so we were reading a book about black holes, and we're reading this passage, and we're coming across all these words, quasars and all these other things. And I struggled to understand that passage, and he was explaining it to me. So even though I could like physically decode the words better, he understood that passage better because he had learned so much already about black holes in space, that his comprehension was better than mine. And he was explaining to me what I'm like, okay, so wait, what is a quasar? Let me read that again. You know, Stacy, were you gonna say something?
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, what you said was just descriptive of that. Research, like I said, states that the best way to grow your vocabulary is through reading. But before that, that's why to your question about why teach it in the early grades, why focus on it, we need to do that verbally, right? So that you can make those connections. And your son just demonstrated that perfectly. I know, he's not in the early grades. But that's why we do it. So they have that vocabulary. By the time they can decode, they can make those connections quickly. And you do you need to understand at least 90 to 95% of every word on the page to have a decent or an adequate amount of comprehension. So it's important that we build that early on.
Donell Pons:And I like Stacy, what you were saying about the verbal it's a part of your life, even for yourself when you were younger, you don't remember most of us, right? Those those years of being a 12345 Lots people think they have never heard you speak before they were three but that's that's reaching and stretching to think we have those memories in mind don't really kick in till about six, seven, even eight, probably if I want to have a real steady memory. But there's so much that's been laid down for someone prior in that time period with verbal language like you say, and that's why they say when you have young kids, you should talk as much as you can to them always be talking. And I think it's kind of interesting at my I have these four children and they didn't watch a whole lot of television. We you know, they got teased a lot that we didn't have a whole lot of technology when they were younger. It's so hard now today with all the technology to keep that out of your kids lives but if it's wasn't all that difficult. And we moved quite a bit. We didn't want to have a big TV. So it just didn't seem to be a part of our lives. The kids spent a lot of time outside. And I remember my kids coming home from school. So they had a vast knowledge of things, because we just talk all the time, we were just talking all the time talking about what we were doing outside talking inside. It was fantastic. But they came home from school one day, and my daughter says to me, she was young. And she says to me, yes, the kids at school today we're talking about the fact that we don't have a television. And one of them was trying to say, Well, what he was trying to say is that we were Amish. But he didn't know the word. That's hilarious. He's trying to say we were Amish. But he didn't know the word. Yeah, that's that important to save having conversation, right? Like Stacy, you were mentioning.
Lindsay Kemeny:Yes. And that leads into what I wanted to talk about next, which is how students learn vocabulary words, because there's kind of two different ways we can learn through direct instruction. And we can learn through indirect learning. And the majority of the word students are going to learn will be through that indirect learning. So like Donnell is talking about the oral language piece in the conversations? How else can we encourage that indirect learning of of words,
Stacy Hurst:do you know one of my very favorite practices, and I teach my students in every reading class, they always have an assignment related to dialogic reading, because that is built right in that you're focusing on the vocabulary and conversation about the book. So it's a read aloud interactive experience, that you can think ahead and be very intentional about. So I think that's one really greatway to do it.
Lindsay Kemeny:Yes, that's awesome. With the reading, that was one thing with my son, because they had silent reading time in the classroom when he was in third grade. But he could only at that time, he could only, you know, actually decode very, very beginner books. And so it was really important to us that he was allowed to listen to audiobooks during that time, because that would expose him to more complex vocabulary grade level, and, you know, more critical thinking skills and that kind of thing. So if we don't work on that, at the same time, then if we get the reading caught up, we don't want the vocabulary to be way behind are the comprehension,
Donell Pons:I'm going to chime in there with you, Lindsay about just making sure that you're allowing students, what you did is you play to your son strengths. And that's really important to do, right, we don't all come with the same background and the same abilities. And so you leaned into a skill of your that your son has, I have a son who has dyslexia, dysgraphia dyscalculia, we've talked about that before. And I did the very same thing. He had a real affinity for spoken language. And he had a love of hearing stories. And so we play to that strength. That was ear reading, we call the ear reading, it was just as important as eye reading. And it got every bit as much support at home. And we taught we championed it. And his ability to be able to, you know, navigate subjects. That was so great, because of all that knowledge that background knowledge had been gaining by ear reading all through the years when we were trying to catch up with the eye reading. So I love hearing that story. Stacy, you go ahead.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, I was just going to share a statistic, if you don't mind. Because I think it's really important that we're reading aloud. I don't really know anybody who argues it that I don't. And if they do, I would just smile at them and say Have a good day. I guess that's really, you know, that's like arguing that comprehension isn't important to reading. But as teachers in those early grades, we are so focused, oftentimes on making sure that they can read the words on the page, which is the number one contributor in those grade levels, to reading comprehension, they have to be able to decode accurately in those grade levels. That's the number one contributor to reading comprehension. After that it is vocabulary, once they can decode vocabulary and background knowledge are the greatest contributors to reading comprehension after we can decode. But this research is in the one I'm referencing is by Hayes and Aaron's and it's a 1988 study. So I would love to know maybe somebody out there knows if there's been a more recent study. But this is the frequency of rare words in printed texts, television and speech. Do you remember hearing about this study? So in scientific journal abstracts, which we've read plenty of, there are 128 rare words per every 1000 words. And I feel it sometimes, depending on the research study, I'm reading there are more than that. There really are and that's where you can look up and grow your vocabulary, right? Newspapers, which again, this study was done in 1988. So a little archaic there had 68 rare words per 1000 children's books had 30 rare words per 1000 and that was significantly greater than any TV show or even rare words in adult speech. Interesting.
Lindsay Kemeny:Yeah. So we really want to promote those vocabulary rich classrooms. And we can use sophisticated words, you know, during to start classroom routines. For example, we have our big, you know, kind of basal reader. Instead of saying, Get out your big book, I say, get out your anthologies. And I remember at the beginning of the year, and all the kids are looking at each other, why is an anthology, you know, but now they know and they can use that word. And I saw this great article, we'll have to link it in our show notes. And it's by Holly lane and Stephanie Allen, called the vocabulary rich classroom. And it gives lots of ideas for how to model sophisticated words. And so it gives ideas for like, in your like, for supplies. in your classroom, you can use words like distribute, replenish, you know, if you're walking in a line, you can use words like approach adjacent proceed. In group time, when working in groups, you can use words like articulate, elaborate, determine, you know, and it has several different ones. And so I was thinking of maybe just choosing one, you know, maybe a different one every day and writing it up in the corner in the back of my room or something. So I would remember and to use that word, so I thought there was good advice in that article. So let's talk about what types of words we should teach. And I love the book bringing words to life, Isabel Beck, and I don't know how to say Mick McEwan, I'm not sure how to say her name. And anyway, they talk about tier one, tier two tier three words, does anyone want to give us just a brief rundown of what those are? Okay, so, tier one words are kind of those everyday words that the students are already encounter all the time. At tier two words, these are words that are not too difficult to explain to young children. And they have a wide range of, you know, high utility words. And then we have tier three words, which are going to be very content specific, like when I was talking about black holes and quasars. So when we're thinking about which words we should teach, we want to focus on those tier two words. Now, of course, if you have English learners in your classroom, they're going to need a lot of instruction in the tier one words. But tier two is kind of, you know, where they they suggest spending a lot of our time. So we're moving now to kind of more of that direct instruction. So what are some best practices when it comes to direct instruction or vocabulary instruction?
Stacy Hurst:Well, Isabel Beck is a great resource for this too. And Anita Archer, we always have to refer to her repetition is a really important thing, kid friendly definitions. And then examples and non examples are really helpful.
Lindsay Kemeny:Yes, okay, that student friendly definition. I just remember my kids bringing home this word list of vocabulary words that they had to memorize or learn from school, and they would have the dictionary definitions, and sometimes they were more complicated than the word themselves. And so, you know, it's so important to kind of figure out how to change that definition to a kid friendly one. So I have an example where I looked up electricity, okay, in the normal dictionary, and it said, a fundamental form of energy observable in positive and negative forms that occurs naturally or is produced. And that is expressed in terms of the movement and interaction of electrons. I mean, if I would tell my second graders that they would be what I have no idea what that means. And that is one of our vocabulary words this week. And then versus I found this great website that gives you student friendly definitions. And it said, the power that is carried by wires cables used to provide light or heat to make machines work, etc. like that so much, so much easier to understand.
Stacy Hurst:I love that because they used they in the dictionary definition, they used a lot of tier three words, right?
Lindsay Kemeny:I know. I mean, they have observable fundamental positive and negative forms occurs.
Stacy Hurst:Those are tier two, but some Yeah, are very specific to that. That field, no pun intended. You know what I'm wondering if you have found, either of you have found a good curriculum resource that will help aid in vocabulary development.
Donell Pons:So I don't want to answer the curriculum. One, maybe Lindsay, like, give me a chance to think but I did have a thought on when you were talking about dictionary and dictionary friendly, child friendly using the dictionary definitions. And that is also having your students understand that when they look up a word whether it's going to be online, or they're in a physical book of some kind, how to interpret what they're looking at in a dictionary. That's something meaning we don't talk about much anymore. So I have students oftentimes who say, Yeah, I looked it up but had like six definitions, which one do I use? And they didn't understand it. They're in rank, from the most used definition, or the most common occurring on down. So just understanding the information that they're finding when they look up a word that isn't really talked about much at least I'm having a lot of students that are now older that said, That was never explained to me. And that's really important. That's as important as providing the definition is, where did I get it? How did I prioritize what I want to have with it. The other thing is that tells you parts of speech too. So there are lots of pieces of information you're getting about a word, when you look it up, either in a dictionary, like I said, a hardcopy or online and all that information is important. Stacy, you want to say something,
Stacy Hurst:just really quickly, I think I've talked about this student before he was a student that I tutored, and, man, I just, I just think happy thoughts when I think of this kid, but he has dyslexia. And he was in junior high when I was tutoring him, his go to for figuring out what any word meant was to put it in Google and then hit images. So pictures are also important to help build vocabulary. Ideally, you would be able to decode the words and have that you know, that connection. But that is also when we're talking about teaching those dictionary skills, Donell, using all of our resources, and technology helps with that a lot too.
Lindsay Kemeny:I would just put a warning out on that if you're going to do that preview those words first before they search them on Google, because we just had on our school last week where they put in a word that you wouldn't think anything bad would come up and they had some pornographic images come up. And it was. So you just got to preview and see what's there. Make sure you have Google Safe Search. But even that's not perfect. But
Stacy Hurst:So curriculum resources. Lindsay, do you? Okay?
Lindsay Kemeny:Yes, well, I found when recently but first, I mentioned that dictionary. So let me just tell you the name of that. It's the long man Dictionary of Contemporary English online. And that's where I was putting in words. And it was the definitions were so much simpler. A great resource I found are these text talk lessons. And they were written by a group of teachers from Utah. And they just go through, you know, a lot of children's literature, and it has a lesson for each one. So they choose, you know, maybe five or six words for each text. And it goes through the lesson plan, just as it's described in the book, bringing words to life. And so I think that's just a great resource. It's a great collection. So we will add that link as well,
Stacy Hurst:that you know, I do remember hearing about that. And I agree, I think that is fantastic. I just want to share, I think it's out of print. But really well done. In fact, Isabel Beck, either she authored it or was a consultant on it. But way back in the day Rigby, which we don't even hear of that company hardly ever anymore. They had an elements of literacy program. And the thing I liked about it as you could buy, it was the five areas that the national reading panel said you could buy separate curricular content for each area. But they had a really great vocabulary one, and it had pictures, and it had kid friendly definitions. And you even had a chart in your classroom that every week, kids would do tally marks for how many times they use the five words that you're focusing on for the week. And I thought the really powerful thing was the examples and the non examples, kind of like we do as some versions of the Frayer model, how you have them come up with a non example that almost helps cement the definition better than the example does.
Lindsay Kemeny:I really learned the importance of that when I was doing that word of day thing for myself, because I would read the Word and the definition. And I was like, Wait, I've got it, I need more examples how to use this in a sentence. So it was kind of fun to see that myself like how important that is. Okay, then it's really important for these students for these words that are brand new to them, to see how you can use them examples. And as you said, non examples.
Donell Pons:Now I wanted to add, I love all of these examples that I work with older students too. That's usually who I'm working with. And that can be of all ages. I'm doing middle school, high school, college adult. And what's interesting is I can't do vocabulary without doing grammar, and taking our my students through sentence structure to so mine are just closely linked. They're just together all the time. And one of the books that I've always leaned into is help your kids with language arts. It's a fantastic book. And I picked it up at Costco years ago, but it's laid out so well. And we'll leave this in the notes too. So that people I think Amazon did have a few copies. I've mentioned it to people. But what it does, it's such a nice way of taking you through introducing talking about just individual words then a couple of words in a sentence and then adding more words to a sentence and how all of those words working together creates meaning within a sentence. And I can't tell you what an eye opener. Of course with any good, full robust program that's hitting all of the high points in structured literacy, right, we don't do anything individually. But when you put that in together, it is such a game changer for older folks. Even students that are fourth, fifth sixth grade, where a lot of these components were missing for them, nobody really put the pieces together, that they can finally start making sense of sentences that then make sense of a paragraph that then turns into being able to understand a whole page, you can change subject, maybe this is a subject I'm unfamiliar with. And you can use the same technique. Let's talk about the words that are in this sentence. Let's get some meaning for some of these words. What do they mean when they're with each other? In this sentence? What do we think this sentence means? What do we think these two sentences mean? Three sentences, this paragraph leading into the next paragraph, game changer for a lot of students. So all of these things, as we all know, are tied so closely together, and will overall in the end is comprehension, right, being able to understand is so great.
Lindsay Kemeny:I love that Donell is such a good reminder. It's not just the words themselves, but how they work in the sentence and then a couple sentences and I love that. Thank you,
Stacy Hurst:when we think about that four part processing model. And we do as adults, that part is pretty automatic. For us. I know our brains go through possible definitions, and then use the context to decide which one really fast. I also am wondering, and Donell, I think you've done this with students you've worked with to the link between morphology and vocabulary.
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Lindsay Kemeny:So okay, let's talk about this the lesson. So we're kind of talking about some best practices for this direct vocabulary instruction we talked about, we want to start with a student friendly definition. And then we want to give lots of examples and non examples. And then another thing to remember is that we want the students to interact with the examples to have, you know, a lot of practice with that. So let's talk about some ways students can interact with vocabulary words, I have a few ideas while you guys are thinking and then if you have something to add, I have, I went and visited another teacher and she had just this little bell at the front of a room and any the time one of the kids use that week's vocabulary words in a sentence, or, you know, anytime in a conversation, they got to come up and bring the bell. And I thought that was really cute. When I went to plain talk, I got this idea where the students could do little skits with their vocabulary words. So I just took you know, I put two vocabulary words on an index card, and then I had like six different cards. And I just randomly pass them out to each group. And then together, they have come up with a skit where they had to use those two vocabulary words, and then they performed them. And that was so fun. They loved it. And sometimes they might use the word a little bit incorrectly. So you know, I had to kind of help model for them the right way to use that. Do you guys have any ideas?
Donell Pons:Yeah. So you know, again, working with older students, and this can also be, you know, you can do a modification on this assignment, and maybe use it with even younger students. I've used it on very young students to modifying it. But I because my first love is, as a reporter, and writing, I think there's no better way to really understand the written word than to write a piece like it's going to be in the newspaper, because you bring it right down to the nuts and bolts, you want all of the information that's pertinent and salient. You got to answer those questions about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Write in that first paragraph. And so you get the inverted pyramid there, where you have all that good tight information at the top. And then we can have the details coming down to the bottom. And I like to have my students will pick a subject matter that has our vocabulary that we've been working with, that's related to the subject, and then we're going to write an article, it's a quick one, we might do three paragraphs, that's going to be related to that topic that uses our vocabulary. This also gets into using some of the morphology that Stacy was mentioning, because some of the words may be the base of the word, I want to make that into a verb, I want it to be active. So I'm going to be adding a suffix ing and how that's going to change my word, and also the part of speech. So it might also even alter meaning sometimes we can talk about that. It's a fantastic way and again, it's three paragraphs, but it's a really nice way of your students not only getting some writing exposure, but they're using the words which we all know once you're you really using that word it can become yours. And they're being able to write with it and then you're getting some morphology in there. It kind of brings everything together. Plus I love doing it. It's so much fun.
Lindsay Kemeny:I love that Donell, okay? I do something similar but just for the last month, I've kind of become obsessed with Nancy Fetzer. And she has like a writing curriculum. And she has all these free writing videos on her website. And she has a, I don't know what to call it technique, practice called Word masters to movie scripts. And I've just started doing this where we take, we're gonna become word Masters on some of our vocabulary words for that week. So I'll choose three of the words, I try to have them be verbs is what she suggests. And then we create kind of a it's a movie script. But really just a story, beginning, middle and end, we're going to use three of the words that were in our story this week, but we're going to use them in a new context, which is really great to give them extra exposure. And then they get to write the story. And they're using those words. So I get to say, Oh, now your word masters because once you've used that word and written it, you know your word, Master. So that's, that's been fun.
Stacy Hurst:I love that. And that type of writing, will again, get that word in their long term memory in so many different ways, too. I was doing a workshop a couple of weeks ago with adults, and we were learning the word indelible, because it's in a Robert Munch story, that I never remember the title too. But there's a repeated phrase in there indelible markers that never come off. I can't remember it. Darn, I wish I could, because that would sound so much smoother than it just did. But the word indelible, at the root of it is de l, which is related to delete. So indelible, you can't delete it, right. And once we made that anchor, then we talked about ways that students could respond to that. So you have it in the story, you're going to pre teach it. And then they can write about something that was indelible in their lives, right. So I love all of that. All great suggestions. I want to just go teach kids all these things right now.
Lindsay Kemeny:One last thing I wanted to mention, if you've heard of Freddy Hiebert, she has a book called Teaching words and how they work. And she's done a lot with vocabulary. And I just want to share this quote that she has said, where she said words aren't individual islands floating by themselves. And so she really talks about teaching words as networks, like instead of these isolated words, think of how you can group them and how they're connected. And she has a great website, everything on it is free. I think it's text project.org. And she'll have groups like she'll have super synonym sets, like for stories, she'll talk about that, you know, narrative text, and how all the words that mean think. And you could choose several off, you know, that are all kind of related or emotion words. Sorry, I said think but that was an example of a communication word or emotion words or movement or traits. Anyways, a wealth of resources, you can kind of go down a rabbit hole on her website, but everything's free. And there's a lot of great information there. But I just think that's important to remember. Something I want to work on better is connecting those words and not just teaching isolated words. Yeah. And
Stacy Hurst:Freddie Heber is an unsung hero. I recommend that website. She has a lot of information about text complexity. That helped me a lot as a classroom teacher, but also as a literacy coach. It's a really great resource.
Lindsay Kemeny:Awesome. Well, this was a great episode. I thank you guys for sharing all your ideas. And hopefully that was an overload of ideas for everyone. But we'll put a lot of those links in our show notes, our newsletter so you can have them.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, and we will be so happy to hear from you what works in your classroom with the students that you're teaching. As far as vocabulary goes. Thank you, Lindsay for this great topic, and hopefully, everybody found something that they can apply tomorrow. We'll see you next time on literacy talks.
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