Word Aware (Spiral Bind): Teaching vocabulary across the day, across the curriculum

Product Information

It provides a structured approach to promote vocabulary development in all children. It details a comprehensive and structured approach to learning with a multitude of activities and lesson plans. It adopts a whole school approach but is equally effective for specific classes and groups or individual learners. It is an effective tool to teach children who speak English as an additional language. It particularly suitable for Key Stages 1 and 2. This rigorously tried-and-tested approach is an outstanding resource that will be an essential addition to any early years’ setting or preschool classroom. It is also an important addition to the materials used by speech and language therapists. It is particularly suitable for ages 3 to 5+ The SENCO role was established nearly thirty years ago in the SEN Code of Practice 1994 where it stated that all mainstream schools must have a SENCO responsible for coordinating services around children with SEN. Children need twelve meaningful encounters of a word before they really know it. Word Aware promotes a method called STAR, which stands for Select, Teach, Activate and Review. This process ensures the children encounter the new words many times and many different ways.

Word Aware is a whole school vocabulary approach to promote vocabulary development in children. This method of developing spoken and written vocabulary in all children is evidence-based following extensive research by Anna Branagan and Stephen Parsons. It is of particular value for children with special education needs and for those learning English as an additional language. Fantastic. Range of strategies for developing vocabulary across the primary age range. Easily accessible.” Teaching vocabulary: Teaching topic related vocabulary using STAR approach. S- Select words from the curriculum Anchor words – these are words which would be expected to be known by the majority of children of this age and which come up in everyday life.Teaching covers phonological sound, syntactic grammar and semantic meaning. In other words, we will be teaching the sound and initial letters of the word; what word class it is (for example, a noun, adjective, adverb, verb) including how the word is structured in a sentence; and what the word means. Children will have access to dictionaries to look up the word, they will consider synonyms and will create their own sentences with the word to consolidate meaning. Other activities used include: word raps, word songs, acting out the word, discussing prefixes and suffixes, symbols or pictures, spelling of the word, syllables, rhyme, physically experiencing the word (where possible), using objects, links to what the children already know and identifying related situations that the word does not apply to. Review – There are many, many fun ways to review taught vocabulary in the Word Aware book. There are great ideas of questions to ask at the end of the lesson as well, which are more interesting and useful than “what does x word mean?” For example, “when do you think you might use this word again?” or “how do you think you will remember this word”. As with anything, I think the key is to keep it fun, varied and engaging – no-one learns well when they’re bored! Vocabulary is important the world over. In the US, the Common Core has brought vocabulary to the fore whilst in England the curriculum specifically highlights the importance of vocabulary. Vocabulary is important from Early Years right through to secondary / high schooling as a result of the vast explosion of topic specific information. This free resource includes a series of visual summaries that provide an overview of the Word Aware Approach for Early Years Practitioners. It also includes several teaching concepts that will promote children's natural word learning.

The book starts with a detailed, interesting and clearly referenced introduction, which would be very useful for teaching staff and is a great refresher for SLTs. I like the fact that the approach is designed for the whole class, so it’s inclusive and that there is a strong emphasis on the importance of Adult Child Interaction.”In September 2014, I trialled the use of Word Aware with my Year 5 class. These children had particularly poor language skills and found it difficult to understand the books they were reading. They also used quite basic language in their own writing. After such a positive trial with this class, we held a Word Aware staff meeting to get the whole school involved in using these approaches. This then became a target on our Raising Achievement Plan for Writing. Ages: 0-5 (Pre-School), Ages: 5-8 (Lower Primary), Ages: 8-10 (Middle Primary), Ages: 10-12 (Upper Primary) Language for Thinking’ is a targeted intervention for developing a child’s ability to understand questions, starting from the most concrete (e.g. Who? Where?) and moving on to the more abstract (e.g. Why? How?). ‘Language for Thinking’ is widely used because it is effective and easy to implement.

Word Aware has been developed by combining up to date research with extensive classroom experience. Stephen Parsons and Anna Branagan have been using this approach and training many practitioners since 2010. The end product is an effective and time efficient method for developing the spoken and written vocabulary of all children. It has been enthusiastically received by class teachers, head teachers, curriculum coordinators, Special Needs co-coordinators, Learning Support Assistants and Speech and Language Therapists / Pathologists. The teacher will select the appropriate words to teach using the Word Aware approach. These will be really useful words which are likely to be encountered again in spoken language or reading. The average adult will have a good level of knowledge of the word. Topic words will be taught where they are core to topic learning. In July 2014, I went on the Word Aware training delivered by Anna Branagan to see if the strategies could be used within SEN intervention groups. However it soon became apparent that all of our children would benefit from the approaches used! The training was very informative and focused on many aspects of vocabulary teaching and learning. It gave lots of practical activities and games to support the acquisition of vocabulary and to enable children to develop ways of working out what words mean. We also felt that these methods would build on the Read, Write, Inc ‘power words’ strategy that was already embedded in Key Stage 1. Step-on words – these are words that are very specific to the topic but are not so important for understanding the topic and are less likely to come up frequently. Word Aware 3 is a comprehensive, practical and engaging resource that focuses on teaching vocabulary and word learning skills to children aged6 to 11 years who have vocabulary learning needs.We are working in pertnership with Lift Lessons. They have developed amazing videos on science concepts for 6-14 year olds. A great resource.