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I was a teenager cramming for the SAT when I ran into a list of vocabulary words I was sure I'd never seen before, Niepodam.
I memorized what they meant, took the test, and moved on. Then those exact words started showing up everywhere.
They'd been sitting in my books the whole time. My brain had just been skipping right over them because it didn't know what they meant.
Which, of course, got me thinking about the kids in your room.
Every day, they hear words that fly right past them. Nobody ever handed most of us a plan for catching those words, and "just teach them new words" isn't a plan.
That's exactly what this week's podcast episode fixes. My guest, Dr. Blythe Anderson, is a former first grade teacher who now studies vocabulary at the University at Buffalo.
She watched early elementary teachers during science lessons and found 31 tiny moves that help kids learn new words. Most of them take just a few seconds, and you're probably already doing some of them without realizing it.
But the one that stuck with me started with her four-year-old, a creature he built out of his dinner, and a word she never expected him to know...
She also explains why knowing what a word means actually makes it easier for kids to sound it out. It's one of those ideas that makes so much sense the second you hear it.
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