As an educator to our youngest learners, you play a big role in helping your preschool students build their vocabulary skills. In fact, helping children build these important skills in the first few years of life is a crucial part of ensuring their success in kindergarten and beyond. Here are three ways you can increase your students’ vocabulary in the classroom:
- Use Story Time to Teach Them New Words
Story time presents countless opportunities for you to share new words with the preschoolers in your care. As you’re reading together, explain any unfamiliar words and have a classroom conversation to talk about their meanings. To take it one step further, try bringing in the real items to the things you’ve explained to your students from the book. - Emphasize Feeling Words
To help your students learn to express their emotions, incorporate feeling words into conversations. Try regularly using words like happy, frustrated, tired, mad and excited as you describe how you’re feeling in different situations. - Use Lots of Descriptive Words in Conversations
To encourage your students to use more descriptive words in their speech, try doing the same as you talk to them. You can try saying something like, “You have chosen the big and round green ball from the box” instead of “You have chosen the ball from the box.”