Last spring I inquired of a homeschooling mother with certification to counsel parents about learning styles who also is certified with
SENG (Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted) about ideas to teach my now-seventh grade
visual-spatial learner vocabulary words. I explained that past work in vocabulary workbooks with A grade if not 100% scores on the pages resulted in no long term memory recall of the words "learned". I wanted ideas for something else to do that would result in more concrete learning.
The suggestion was a two-pronged approach. First to use a quality workbook based vocabulary program to do the typical
(auditory-sequential geared) learning but only do it part of the time, not as 100% of the lessons. The goal of that is to expose the student to words and word roots that may be helpful when taking the SAT. The second was to use every opportunity to draw words out of other studies or real life, which really isn't something that can be planned for. Lastly she suggested we read parts of The Wall Street Journal together, discuss the articles and pick words out.
Here is how I modified her idea for using The Wall Street Journal. We get a student rate discount for the print version of The WSJ that makes it much more affordable (and also gives us online access to the articles).
The term escapes me for this story (it has a name) but the stories that are most interesting and fun are the ones on the front page in the center at the bottom. Other times some articles in the Personal Journal or even Marketplace pique my son's interest, especially if they are about a new movie coming out, a favorite book of his or are about the toy industry. At present I am skimming WSJ for the articles I have a feeling he'll be curious about or will find funny at least entertaining.
Sometimes I present him with five or six and let him pick which article to use in his lesson. Other times I just pick it and present it to him.
I read through the article myself first and use a highlighter pen to mark words that I think he might not know. I use two different highlighter color pens , one for jargon or slang and another color for a word that I am certain will be found in a standard dictionary. Some I think he knows but I am 100% not sure about. I want him to know some of what I pick out. Some I know he does not know. I also highlight slang terms and jargon that I honestly don't know if he knows. (Often my assumption that he knows them is wrong so I’ve been erring on the side of caution by highlighting many of these terms even if they seem easy.)
I ask him to read through the article one time.
We discuss his interpretation of the article. Sometimes some of it has gone over his head. I talk about it a little bit but don't go too much into detail. I don’t get into a discussion of the words he must have ignored or misunderstood to have caused either his confusion or for the information to have gone over his head.
He then uses lined paper to write out highlighted word. He puts a Y or N to indicate if he thinks he knows what the word means. I was curious to see if he ever thought he knew the meaning but was wrong. He looks the word up in a dictionary book. (I want him to have more practice doing this as he has not done a lot of that.) He notes the type of word (noun, adjective, etc.) as a review-reminder of the grammar terms, then writes out the definition. He does all of the regular words first.
The next step is he either circles or crosses out the Y or N to show if he was right or wrong with his estimate. For example if the indicated Y that he did know the meaning of the word but after reading the definition he learns he was incorrect, he would strike it through. If he thought he knew the word and indicated Y and was correct he circles it. This helps me see at a glance if his own estimate of his knowledge base was correct or incorrect, this is relevant to explain why perhaps his comprehension of the article was off.
Afterwards, for a second step in the process, for the slang and jargon, he uses the Internet and Google to search for the terms by putting the phrase in quotation marks and the keyword ‘definition’. They are found on one of a few sites that do include such words and phrases and provide a dictionary entry for them, they are usually the top hits on the page. He writes those out as well.
If there are a lot of words this looking up of words and phrases is spread out over two days. We have been splitting it up as 45 minutes or more of copy work with close work is too much for my son to handle in one sitting with his visual processing disorder and the small print of the dictionary.
I'll share that sometimes my son thought he knew what a word meant but he was wrong. This negatively affected his ability to accurately understand what the journalist had written. Sometimes a word I thought he didn't know, he did know. And the few easier words that he was forced to look up seemed like a nuisance but provided him some self-confidence that he was not only working with words he was ignorant about or was wrong about his understanding of. Also some of the commonly used slang and jargon phrases that I thought he knew, he didn't know. You may be surprised to realize how much jargon is in American speech that we assume kids know.
On the third day I have him skim the vocabulary word list he wrote out, and then he re-reads the article. My hope is that new meaning will be revealed to him now that he knows more words or knows the real meaning of the words.
We then discuss the article. I try to gauge what he gleaned from it versus what I got out of it. I'll note if the article goes too deep into certain areas I will tell him we are not focusing on that but the other parts. For example there was a long article about collector's items that become a fad and work up to a frenzy but after the fad passes the items are basically worthless. A main discussion was the Beanie Baby fad and how scarce the items were and how some collectors actually thought that buying them and reselling them later may fund their children's college educations. Then they discussed how you practically can't give them away now and how eBay auctions of some formerly valuable Beanie Babies don't have a single bid on them. I wanted my son to think about this a bit as he is a collector and thinks some of his Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards are actually really worth something. The article went into a discussion of investing money in certain types of financial products and that part was too in-depth for me let alone him to understand (that is my husband's area of expertise). The goal of the vocabulary lesson was not to make it a stock investing lesson so I just explained to him up front that I didn't want to focus on that section of the article as I didn't want him to get upset or overwhelmed about not understanding that part of the article.
I was aiming for one article to be done a week but we have not kept up with it in our busy time of the year for outside academic classes and other events. This is also taking longer to do than I originally assumed it would; I thought he could do it all in one day but was wrong.
I take the cut out article and place it in a plastic sheet protector sleeve with his handwritten work and place them in a three-ring binder. If I had found the articles on the Internet and printed them off using a printer I’d three-hole punch the papers and put them directly into a three-ring binder. As I write this I am considering shifting my son to do this work in front of the computer and putting the content into a word processor instead. I have not yet made the shift to having him do keyboarding instead of handwriting. My son has some symptoms of, but has not been diagnosed with dysgraphia. Perhaps that change would help him (and some other students; this is a common suggestion for students with dysgraphia).
Lastly I’m sticking with the paper book dictionary for now to reinforce alphabetization skills something that needs practice due to his visual processing disorder. Yes, it would be easier and faster to just use the Internet to look the words up but the other way is helping him with some basic skills including being forced to recall the first three or four letters in a word (a challenge for people with visual processing disorders) so I’m continuing that for now.
I agree with the choice of The Wall Street Journal as the newspaper to use for two reasons. The first is that it is the only newspaper we subscribe to, so I have it at my disposal. The second reason is that I feel that the city newspaper and USA Today are too dumbed down, they are written on an eighth grade or even as low as a fifth grade level (according to some opinions which I cannot verify as being valid). What I do know is the city newspapers usually don’t have many articles that are very interesting, instead they focus on crime and current event news that is both strongly biased as well as dumbed down. Others may choose to use The New York Times but frankly I don’t like their bias and we choose to not support them financially by subscribing. We only need a certain small number of articles to use so I just focus on using the resource that I have available to me already, and that’s The Wall Street Journal.
Today it dawned on me that what started out as a vocabulary word lesson has wound up being also about reading comprehension of nonfiction writing. That is a subject that is important so I am glad I'm killing two birds with one stone. The content of these articles can vary widely so they can be considered 'content' teaching as well. Some are deep into science, history, geography and other cultures while others are about sales, business, investing, legal issues, trends or even some other interesting topics.
These articles also made me realize that there are a number of topics of interest and help for a student (young person) to know about that is not considered a 'school subject' such as legal issues, copyright, marketing (to kids and adults), consumerism, ethical issues, and other things. One thing I note about these articles is they often go deep and show some complexity to the issue that presents a problem that is not so easily solved. I think we need to discuss this more with young people as the tendency to narrow down topics to imply that things are all black or all white and can be fixed easily and quickly with simple solutions is often what kids think about the real world when in fact that is a huge falsehood.
I hope someday that my sons will pick up The Wall Street Journal on their own and skim over it looking for articles they want to read. I want them to become readers. I hope the introduction to WSJ through articles of interest to them will show them that reading that newspaper is not scary, can be entertaining and informative and is worthwhile to do.
Resources We Use
Merriam-Webster’s Intermediate Dictionary
Google
Disclosure: I received no payment for mentioning these products. The products mentioned were purchased by our family for our personal use. See full disclosure statement, link is available near the top of my blog’s sidebar.
