Words, Words, Words: Teaching Vocabulary in Grades 4-12

An excellent resource for all teachers. There are lots of ideas to help activate students background knowledge. There are ideas to teach context clues, words walls, prefixes, suffixes, and roots.

My favorite section was an idea on how to use alphabet books with older students. I plan to incorporate this lesson in my classroom.

All teachers should buy this book. This is also a great book for a professional book study.

I purchased the book for my husband. He is a High School English/Journalism teacher. He really wanted to have it on hand for school.

This is a great book that explains how students learn new words and build their vocabulary. It gives you strategies that will allow students to hold onto what they learn and begin to use new vocabulary in their everyday language. Excellent for professional development.

Regardless if you are teaching elementary school or middle school, you have students in your classroom who are poor readers and writers. Janet Allen's book -- all of them, for that matter -- are comprehensive guides to providing tips and strategies on how to assist them to "own their learning." So many pages of this book are folded down, as a means to remind me to use the strategy in my own classroom. Her book recommendations are also very handy, especially when you want to model different instructional strategies on learning new vocabulary while reading.

I can't say enough about this book and the rest of Allen's books without sounding like I am repeating myself. As an educator, I value good books that help me to become a better teacher -- this is such a book. You will not be disappointed.

Janet Allen has done a terrific job of blending theory with practice. Taking the last twenty years of research on vocabulary, Allen synthesizes the major guiding principles and illustrates a variety of strategies for helping students to acquire and develop vocabulary. As always, Allen writes in a clear, reader-friendly, no-nonsense style--a refreshing change from many of the language arts books in the field. As a reading specialist for the past twenty years, I highly recommend her new book.