Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

10.12.18 Examples of Active Vocabulary Practice from our New Curriculum

  We’re writing a reading curriculum (hooray!) and that means daily review of lesson plans for me, which is great fun and lots of learning. Thought I’d share some examples of how we do it from some recent lessons. Our vocabulary goal is to use lots of active practice to build word knowledge. Start with a…


06.09.15 Active Practice: The Key to Vocabulary

We’ve just finished our chapter on vocabulary in Reading Reconsidered.  In it, we describe ways to  teach new words directly (Explicit Vocabulary Instruction) and ways to increase how much word knowledge students absorb from reading words in texts (Implicit Vocabulary Instruction).  The following is from our discussion of Explicit Vocabulary Instruction and talks about the key…