It's the vocabulary, stupid

Well, not just the vocabulary, but for my urban kids, that surely is a major factor.  This week, our writing focus - visualizing a text - was driven by a poem written by Carmen Lagos Signes:

Pumpkins in the cornfields,

Gold among the brown,

Leaves of rust and scarlet,

Trembling slowly down;

Birds that travel southward,

Lovely time to play;

Nothing is as pleasant

As an Autumn Day!

Such a seemingly bucolic text loaded with typical fall scenery. So what vocabulary did my third graders find to be a challenge? Scarlet, rust (multiple meanings get them every single time!), pleasant, Autumn and.... cornfield.  Without explicit instruction - defining, finding synonyms, antonyms, using the words in sentences - visualizing this text would have turned into a meaningless regurgitation of the author's words.

A simple text, one with which my students would have some familiarity and experience, and the task of writing what the mind saw during the reading, so impacted by challenging vocabulary, challenging especially for second language learners. I am humbled.