RPI DAY 6 Reflection

Today’s PLD made me realise just how important vocabulary is for learning. The more words students know, the easier it is for them to understand what they are reading, share their ideas, and make sense of new learning. It really reinforced the idea that vocabulary plays a big part in reading comprehension. Something that stood out to me was that knowing a word is not as simple as knowing its definition. Words can have different meanings depending on the situation, and students build their understanding of words over time. This made me think about how often I expose students to new words and whether I am giving them enough opportunities to use those words in different ways. I also reflected on my own practice. At the moment, when we come across tricky words, we often look up the meaning, but today's learning reminded me that vocabulary teaching needs to go beyond that. Students need opportunities to discuss words, work out meanings from context, and look at parts of words such as prefixes and suffixes, can we maybe use it in a sentence or part of our writing? My students already do some of this through our You Can Spell programme, but I think I need to be more explicit in showing them how these word parts can help them understand unfamiliar words. I also enjoyed the activity where we had to explain and justify our thinking. It reminded me that students need regular opportunities to share their opinions and back them up with reasons. This is something I can build into my reading discussions more often. What I will take back to my classroom Spend more time talking about new words before and during reading. Encourage students to use clues from the text to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words. Be more explicit when teaching prefixes, suffixes, and other word parts (maybe through warm ups or even setting up tasks as homework) Give students more chances to explain their thinking and justify their answers. Revisit new vocabulary throughout the week so students hear it, use it, and remember it. Overall, today reminded me that building vocabulary is not a one-off lesson. It needs to happen regularly, and the more opportunities students have to hear, discuss, and use new words, the stronger their understanding will become.