Today I was in my practicum classroom helping some kids on their social studies worksheet, and I ran into a dilemma.
A big dilemma.
What do you do when the kids don’t understand the dictionary definition of a word? I’m talking about kids with learning disabilities, but the same situation could apply to kids in the lower grades or kids who are learning English — kids with limited vocabularies, in other words.
The worksheet had a list of sentences and the kids were trying to fill in the sentences from a word bank, but they didn’t know any of the words. Not one. And everyone knows — either from being a teacher or from once being a kid — how hard it is to get a kid to look up words in the dictionary. Let alone 10 of them.
One of the sentences was something like ” During the Stone Age, or the ____________, the first tools were developed.” Both kids wanted to fill the blank with “Ice Age” because they saw the word “age” and figured that was a match. (They weren’t really even reading for comprehension, just looking at the patterns between words.) So I said, “Wait, is that true? Are the Ice Age and the Stone Age the same thing?” and got the obvious answer: “No.”
I told them to skip that one and come back to it when they had fewer choices. Twenty minutes later they had narrowed the bank down to two terms: “Paleolithic era” and “technology.” I made a stupid mistake and said “This’ll be easy; you both know what ‘technology’ means!” only to receive stares full of question marks. They have all those expensive computers and interactive chalkboards in their classrooms, yet they don’t know what it’s called. I’ll be darned.
So, I had them look up the word “paleolithic.” Enter dilemma. Their dictionary, a standard classroom dictionary (this is no Oxford Unabridged) gives a definition to the tune of: “designating or of an Old World cultural period before the Mesolithic, characterized by the use of flint, stone, and bone tools, blah blah blah.” (This one’s from Webster’s New World College Dictionary, by the way.)
So how does one react to such a dilemma? I made them look it up implying they would find the answer. It took them a lot of work to find the page, and to locate the word on the page, and then they struggled on every other word until I told them to stop reading and they had no clue what they had read. If they can’t equate “era” with “age,” chances are they won’t fare any better with “period.”
I’m stumped on this one. Short of just playing dictionary and telling them what it means (i.e. giving them the answer), what does one do?
