Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction,   ISBN:9781572307537

Customer Rating: 

I use this book for my children in a homeschool environment. When I first read this book, many of the concepts resonated true (i.e. that children guess at the meanings of words in books and often "miss the mark"). The book explains how to pull out words from the books that children are reading, and to use those words as a basis for creating vocabulary worksheets. It gives alternate ways for finding vocabulary words as well. The recommendations in this book are very specific, with several examples. It does not do the work for you - you still have to come up with your own words and worksheets. However, the examples are detailed and clear, and I found the process of creating vocabulary worksheets to be simple. The first couple of times that I created worksheets, I had the book open as I created questions, to make sure that I was not missing any important points. After that, it was a breeze. My oldest is an advanced 3rd grade, and I found the recomemndations useful for her age bracket, but I fully expect to use this for many years to come, as the recommendations cross age boundaries well.

Customer Rating: 

I tutor 9th graders and vocabulary is very important. I loved this book. It not only gave good examples of tier 2 and 3 words but how to find them in what they read and how to present them so that they will use them. I am trying these techniques out on my 9th graders.

Customer Rating: 

I think the ideas here are sound, but as I read I imagine a team of writers working together and spending many hours devising lessons. Working teachers don't have that much time. It is generally a bad sign when the positive reviews on the back cover of the book are from PhDs. Quite often these people have never actually used the book with students.

Customer Rating: 

. . . should certainly be a central goal for all reading teachers to transmit to their students. "Bring Words to Life" serves as an excellent reference for doing just that. A variety of strategies are provided to address the needs of readers across grade levels (sorry, but I disagree with those who believe that books, such as this one, should only address the needs of students at particular grade levels), that will prove useful to all teachers.

Although this is a fairly short book (about 130 pages), it provides a lot of useful material. I would recommend this to anyone involved in teaching reading to children.

Customer Rating: 

This is one of the books I bought for my Education (Reading and Writing) class. It's really good, both the theory and examples. A must-buy for K6 teacher ^^