Word Nerds: Teaching All Students to Learn and Love Vocabulary

Word Nerds takes you inside classrooms at a high-poverty urban school and shows how two teachers implement creative, flexible vocabulary instruction that improves their students' word knowledge and confidence, enhances classroom community, and increases achievement. Leslie Montgomery and Margot Holmes Smith weave vocabulary into each school day using multisensory instruction that includes music, art, literature, movement, games, drama, writing, test-taking skills, and technology. Along the way, they turn every student into a lover of language.

With support from literacy specialist Brenda Overturf, Leslie and Margot have developed a five-part plan—introducing new words in context, adding related synonyms and antonyms, engaging students in several days of active learning, celebrating new words, and assessing vocabulary development—that teaches all students to learn and love vocabulary.

This easy-to-read reference explains how to plan, teach, and assess based on the latest research in vocabulary instruction and learning. Forget copying definitions from the dictionary and completing boring worksheets! Word mastery comes from intimate knowledge of language. From prediction to practice to performance, students from all backgrounds can discover how to make words their own. After incorporating Leslie's and Margot's vocabulary plan into your daily instruction, you and your students can become word nerds, too!

• Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading
• EMPOWER Your Students: Tools to Inspire a Meaningful School Experience, Grades 6-12 (Increase Motivation and Engagement in the Classroom)
• Joy Write: Cultivating High-Impact, Low-Stakes Writing
• Bringing Words to Life, Second Edition: Robust Vocabulary Instruction
• Cultivating Mindfulness in the Classroom -effective, low-cost way for educators to help students manage stress (The Classroom Strategies)
• Discipline that Restores: Strategies to Create Respect, Cooperation, and Responsibility in the Classroom
• Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters
• From Striving to Thriving: How to Grow Confident, Capable Readers
• Closer Reading, Grades 3-6: Better Prep, Smarter Lessons, Deeper Comprehension (Corwin Literacy)
• Vocabularians: Integrated Word Study in the Middle Grades