A note about Feb. 9th (vocab)

Last week we started our class with a presentation by Stephanie and Rachel. Their main activity for us was to try and write the definition of an unknown word by using the sentence context and by using its spelling (no matter how complicated). Surprisingly as a class we figured out most of the words and individually we might have gotten about 50% correct on average. Some of the wrong answers may have been due to over thinking and others may have been due to not enough context. I thought the hedgehog one was interesting because I had a porcupine in mind while reading the sentences (which is somewhat similar), but I assumed that since that image was already created by the other words that the unknown word had to be something else (over thought it).

The other part of the class that I enjoyed was Diana's presentation of her vocabulary research. Since vocabulary is such an important thing to teach our students I think that it's necessary to know what kind of research is being done on it and how this can help us to teach it more effectively. On a side note I just want to mention the activity we did in the library computer lab. I thought it was linked well to our readings (and interesting), but it felt like it wasn't a very structured activity. This may have been done intentionally but I know that many of the students in the class weren't clear about what we were doing and I think this was reflected by how uninteresting our D2L postings of our findings were.