Semantics are an important factor in reading success; therefore, children must consistently broaden their vocabulary base. Incorporate a “word of the week.” Teach children a new word each week, enforcing and promoting it. Initiate a competition in which the student who uses the word correctly most often receives a reward. Play a hangman game. Determine a category, such as baby animals, and draw lines on the board to represent letters in the word. Allow students a set amount of guesses before revealing the correct term.
Even if children don’t completely understand syntax, they can surmise--in context--whether a word represents a person, place or thing or an action word. Create your own “Mad Libs.” Write a story and remove some of the words. Determine which part of speech is needed--noun, verb, adjective, adverb--and ask the child to fill in appropriate replacement words. When a student has difficulty with a word in context, have him cover the word and read the remainder of the sentence to figure out what word might fit into the slot.
Students should understand conceptual relationships--how words relate to one another. Say a word aloud, such as cat, and tell students to write as many related words as possible. They may say words such as “tiger,” “purr,” meow,” striped” or “kitty.” Discuss how the list of words are the same or different. Create a Venn diagram, showing the relationship of the vocabulary words.
Children must sound out letters, digraphs, blends and long and short vowels to make sense of pronunciations. Make up “wacky words” and ask the boys and girls to write them based on how they sound. Include words with digraphs such as “ch” and “sh.” Guide children through the pronunciations. Encourage them to make up new wacky words and figure out their spellings. Play a game patterned after musical chairs. Students walk around the chairs as the teacher pronounces words containing the same sound, such as "long a." When she interjects a different sound, such as "short a," the students sit down and the teacher takes away one chair. To practice syllabication, have students sit in a circle. Each child rhythmically claps out the syllables of his first and last name. Reinforce high-frequency sight words by playing a Bingo game with the words.
Create a matching game in which students draw lines from prefixes and suffixes to their meanings. Expand the “wacky words” concept by having students add prefixes and suffixes to their made-up words. If a child determines that “chlozzy” means happy, then “unchlozzy” indicates unhappy. Develop a word wall in the classroom. Write a variety of words on tag board: put root words on rectangle shapes and prefixes and suffixes on squares. Students put the parts together to form words. Design a new wall each week. Provide pages from children's magazines. Students work with partners to circle root words, underline prefixes and double underline suffixes they find on the magazine pages.
A child experiences greater decoding success if he anticipates the story beforehand. Prior to reading a book, he must look at the pictures, the captions, the cover and the pages to make predictions and assumptions. Ask him questions: “What do you think the book will be about?” “Do you think you’ll like this book? Why or why not?” Practice difficult words before students begin to read the story; this enhances fluency and comprehension. Discuss what they already know about the book's topic and brainstorm a list of related words that they predict could be in the story.