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Mrs. Hill (pseudonym) asks her kindergartners to observe the weather through the classroom window and then to draw a picture of their observations. All of the children look out the window. As Mrs. Hill walks around the classroom and looks at their drawings, she is surprised to see that many children are not completing the task as she had intended. There is snow on the ground outside, but it is not currently snowing. Yet, several children's pictures include snowflakes in the sky. It is a cloudy day and the sun is not visible, but some children are drawing suns in the upper corners of their pages. Often these suns include smiley faces and sunglasses! Some children have drawn a house or people in their pictures, but of course there are no houses or people on the playground outside the window.
This vignette is a true story from a real classroom. While these kindergartners knew that observe meant they should look out the window, they did not grasp the nuances of an observation in the context of a science lesson. This depicts one of many reasons that vocabulary (i.e., knowledge of words meanings) can seem daunting to address. There are tens of thousands of words to learn, and even when children have a general sense of what a word might mean, words often have shades of meaning or completely different meanings across contexts (Nagy & Anderson, 1984). Yet this occurrence also shows that, while a formidable task, it is absolutely imperative to focus on children's vocabulary development across all content areas and contexts starting in the early years. The ability to understand and use academic vocabulary is essential for all students' participation in the day-to-day business of school: engaging in lessons and activities, understanding and contributing to conversations, and, of course, comprehending texts. For children with dyslexia, strong vocabulary skills may help to compensate for difficulties with phonological processing as students learn to read (Snowling, Gallagher, & Frith, 2003).
For these reasons, over the past several years, we have been increasingly focused on supporting young children's vocabulary development across content areas using a set of instructional practices that we refer to as content-rich vocabulary instruction (Neuman & Wright, 2013; Wright, 2014). Research demonstrates that...