Standard 4: Vocabulary

Students will expand their working vocabularies to effectively communicate and understand texts.

Student Actions 

Teacher Actions 

• Students will infer relationships among words that have the same meaning (synonyms) (e.g., glad and happy).
• Students will infer relationships among words that mean the opposite (antonyms) (e.g., hot and cold).
• Students will infer relationships among simple words with multiple meanings (e.g. duck can be a noun or verb) and use context to determine meaning from text.

• Teachers explain that synonyms are words that have the same meaning.

• Teachers model using synonyms and provide examples.

• Teachers provide opportunities for students to use synonyms to infer relationships. (eg. word maps & word webs)

• Teachers monitor and provide opportunities for students to receive feedback as students use synonyms to infer relationships among words.

• Teachers explain that antonyms are words that have opposite meanings.

• Teachers model using antonyms and provide examples.

• Teachers provide opportunities for students to use antonyms to infer relationships. (eg. word maps,  word webs, or semantic gradients)

• Teachers monitor and provide opportunities for students to receive feedback as students use antonyms to infer relationships among words.

• Teachers explain how some words can have more than one meaning.

• Teachers provide examples of multiple meaning words in a read aloud.

• Teachers allow students to contribute their own examples of multiple meaning words during a classroom discussion.

• Teachers provide opportunities for students to determine correct meaning of multiple meaning words in context.

• Teachers monitor and provide opportunities for students to receive feedback as students practice using these words to determine meaning.

Student Actions 

Teacher Actions 

• Synonyms are words which have the same meaning (e.g. example, instance, occurrence).

• Antonyms are words which have opposite meanings (e.g., hot and cold).

• Multiple-meaning words are words that are spelled the same, are pronounced the same, but have different meanings that can be determined based on the context of the text. Multiple-meaning words can also be called homonyms.

• Example: I will park the car, so we can walk to the park.

• Example: I left my phone on the left side of my desk.

• Inferring is making a reasonable assumption about meaning that is not explicitly stated in the text.

• The intent of this standard is for students to experience the process of inferring and to apply the skill of making reasonable assumptions by closely examining how words are related to each other (based on synonyms, antonyms, or multiple-meanings) for the purpose of vocabulary development.

Due to recursive nature of the standards, it is essential that teachers are aware of how all objectives within and between strands work together for optimal instruction.