I'll be so glad when tomorrow is over. No more culture training. It's the last session. Finally.

My favorite speaker at the Reading First Summit was Dr. Maria Elena Arguelles. She was great. The title of her talk was "Vocabulary Instruction for ALL Learners." Let me share some of her vocabulary instruction wisdom:

Rich Vocabulary Instruction

• Actively involve students
• Help students make connections to self (activate prior knowledge)
• Encourage deep processing (suggest ways to apply the word)
• Provide multiple exposures and practice over time (have students repeat the word several times)
• Have students create sentences (answer 3 or 4 of these: what, where, when, how, who, why)
• Discuss the difference between new and related words
• Use more than one new word in a sentence
• Discuss the meaning of the same word in different sentences