Causal Chain

In order to identify the causal chain I need to look at the direct acts of teaching that I am going to change in order help vocabulary with my learners that will in turn help with reading comprehension and therefore overall reading progress. 

Changes in my teaching:

• Weekly spelling related to what the students are learning. What I have been doing is gifting a range of spelling words each week that are related to the part of space or earth we are looking at that week. Students are then exposed to that throughout the week in class and I am working on sending these home too in order for students to learn these in more depth. 
• This then allows the students access to more complex vocabulary 
• They can then make connections with these words in their class work and texts related to that this week.
• Expands vocabulary for this topic and works on applied knowledge of the learner.
• Which overall will hopefully lead to greater comprehension strategies which will then help with reading age and ability. 
  
  
  
• Read-Aloud's. This is sometimes a picture book related to the topic that we are learning about or a journal article again related to the topic. I sometimes do this as an introduction to the topic or along the week.
• This then allows the students access to more complex vocabulary 
• Expands vocabulary for this topic and works on applied knowledge of the learner.
• Which overall will hopefully lead to greater comprehension strategies which will then help with reading age and ability.
  
  
• Guided reading sessions focusing on vocabulary development. Focusing on reading in vocabulary in order to make sense or meaning of the words in the context that they are read. 
• This then allows the students access to more complex vocabulary.
• They can then make connections with these words in their class work and texts related to that this week. 
• Expands vocabulary for this topic and works on applied knowledge of the learner.
• Which overall will hopefully lead to greater comprehension strategies which will then help with reading age and ability. 

Some other things that I have been trying to use as an intervention with vocabulary building is having a word wall in my classroom. My students are also currently enjoying the new J. K. Rowling novel. I have really only started pushing some of these ideas towards the end of this term so will continue to make sure these are part of our everyday class instruction and see if this intervention will indeed create a causal chain.