Ch. 2 All About Words- Pytash

I really liked Jago's chapter about vocabulary.  I found that she had a lot of useful insights on how to teach vocabulary effectively to students.  What I liked best about this chapter was her idea that, "The key learning that I try to achieve is that learning new words is a natural act"(27).  One of the biggest ways for students to learn new words is through reading new and various texts, and that is what they should be doing in and out of the English classroom.  So many people choose not to read and they are only hurting themselves.  If students knew all of the benefits from reading I believe students would read more, and therefore, increase their vocabulary.  It was stated in the text, "Children making good progress as readers add 3,000 to 5,000 new words to their vocabulary"(22), this is quite a staggering difference compared to the lesser 300-400 words that can be taught in a year.  I really want to encourage the students in my class to reading different texts whether they be novels, magazines, comics, etc.
When I did my tutoring at Firestone I found that one of my students biggest struggles was vocabulary.  He constantly was fumbling on words that I thought were simple for some at the sophomore level.  I first wanted to make flashcards off of the vocab list that his teacher supplied him with but then I decided that further action needed to be taken.  I started having him make a list of words that he didn't know from the chapter he read each night for homework.  Then together we would use context clues to create our own definitions for each word.  I believe that this benefitted him much more because these were the words that he needed to be focusing on.  They weren't just meaninglessly assigned by the teacher for him to memorize. 
Also, I really liked how she had lists of vocabulary displayed throughout her classroom.  I believe the more you see a word and its definition, the more likely you will be able to remember what it means and how to use it properly.  I could definitely see me using this strategy in my future classroom.  I think the class would benefit a lot from coming up with our own lists of unknown words and then defining them together.  The easier a definition is to understand, the more likely you will use it correctly, and by creating your own definition it makes it that much easier.