… vocabulary! The final component to my reading curriculum is complete. Dang. My kids are going to be buuuusy this year. All in all my reading instruction consists of Guided Reading, individualized spelling instruction (Words Their Way – post coming soon), daily fluency timings on sight words (post also coming soon), writing centers, and vocabulary. Those are the main components – then I throw in a bunch of extra comprehension skill building, question answering, and some fun stuff too 🙂
We started vocabulary last year and it went really well. Kids with autism struggle with language development and benefit from direct instruction on learning new vocabulary words. I really saw these words generalize to my students’ writing and conversation which was great. We work on these words in our daily morning group and take a quiz on the words a the end of the week.
I decided to be a super crazy plan ahead-er and set up vocabulary for the whole year. I created a list of 150 vocabulary words – these are words pulled from 2nd and 3rd grade vocabulary lists and functional/life skills words. So I will have 5 words a week for the whole year. Done and done! I made flashcards and definition cards. The definitions for all of these words are purposefully simple and concrete. Since many of our students struggle with language abilities, it can be hard to explain a new word using language they may or may not understand. So I tried to keep definitions direct and to the point.
I display these in my morning meeting area in a pocket chart:
And then once they are masted they go up on the Word Wall (it’s so empty now….).
I decided this year I will be incorporating our vocabulary words into our homework since homework seems to be the death of me lately. Students will fill out this form with their words for the week:
And each day complete a worksheet:
This whole packet including 150 words with definitions, weekly homework sheets, and a data sheet (of course!) is uploaded to TpT 🙂
Here are the list of words if you are interested:
View a product preview 🙂
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4 Responses
What are you doing for you A/B pre readers?
We focus more on saying the would and build expressive language or I pick very basic words for them to work on.
Thank you greatly, would you be able to share what a schedule look like for one of your higher functioning and one of your lower functioning students. By the way I love your blog
Check out this post on schedules: https://theautismhelper.com/schedules-visual-student-schedules/