One of the characteristics that separate good readers from poor readers is the size of a person’s vocabulary. As teachers, we can help build our student’s vocabularies in one of three ways: the first way is by promoting wide and extensive reading in the classroom. The second way is by encouraging students to experiment and play with words. The third way is by explicitly teaching word meanings and word-learning strategies in the classroom. This does NOT, by the way, mean writing word definitions! That is not the best strategy to help our students expand and grow their vocabulary. Successful classrooms are “word rich and word aware” places where students hear and practice fine tuning their vocabulary on a regular basis. You can find many more tips for building strong vocabulary skills in my books, Threads of Reading: Strategies for Literacy Development (ASCD, 2003) or Literacy Strategies for Grades 4-12: Reinforcing the Threads of Reading (ASCD, 2005).