Sophia Tremont

EDUC 369

September 27, 2018

Understanding Vocabulary

After choosing the word Tatterdemalion, I looked up the meaning so that I knew I had a

good grasp of its definition before teaching it to anyone else. I chose the definition I wanted the

students to have of the word, which was a person wearing tattered or ragged clothing. During the

lesson, I began by asking the students if anyone already knew the meaning of this new word.

When no one knew the answer, I directed the students to break the word apart into “tatter” and

“demalion”. I then asked the students if they knew what tattered meant. Many of them had heard

the word tattered before and gave me the definition of something that is old and torn. I asked

them to think about that when I used tatterdemalion in a sentence, “After a long day of hard

labor, the man was dressed like a tatterdemalion.” The students then pair-shared to come up with

a definition for the word. After that, the class discussed all the ideas, and I lead the students to

the definition I wanted them to have. I also drew a picture to represent the word on the board. To

finish, I asked the students to write the word in a sentence and draw a picture to go along with it.

This gave the students context for the word. This activity made me realize the difficulty of

learning new words and coming up with the meaning when you have no idea at all. This must be

especially difficult for ELL students who are not only learning new words, but new words in a

completely different language.