Vocabulary, Word!

Vocabulary- the knowledge of words and their meanings.

Types of Vocabulary
receptive
productive

I am looking at this, trying to figure out what stands out to be about vocabulary and its use in the classroom. Make no mistake, I know that  a strong vocabulary is VERY important for a child to be successful. After all it affects the child's ability to not only read but to comprehend what he or she is able to read. Students who come in with a smaller range of vocabulary are often a lot further behind in the learning process than the students who come in with a rich vocabulary. That explained, I think what mainly stands out to me in this chapter is receptive words. Most of the words that I know are receptive words. There was not a distinct time when someone sat down and said, "Makita, the word facetious means to be sarcastic in a joking manner". I just picked it up somewhere along the way.

Something else that stands out to me is how students learn vocabulary words. The way that I was taught vocabulary was to memorize them, write a sentence with them and then take a test on them. Every week we had a new list. Did I actually learn these? Some, not all. The older I got the less I learned. I would just memorize them for the test and then as soon as the test was turn in I would dump them from my mind, forgetting that I ever had them in the first place. I like the fact that we wrote sentences using the words, though I distinctly remember hating doing it when I was younger. It gave me the opportunity to tie them into real life,giving me more cause to remember them. Are there better ways of learning vocabulary for older students? Ways that students actually learn them rather than memorize them?