Vocabulary, oral and reading, plays an important part in learning to read. It is very important to reading comprehension—readers can't understand what they're reading without knowing what most of the words mean. Learning the meaning of new vocabulary gets harder as children learn to read more advanced texts. Although a great deal of vocabulary is learned indirectly from hearing and seeing in words in different context, the importance of direct vocabulary instruction grows as reading becomes more complex.

(National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Retrieved May 5, 2011, from http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/smallbook.htm.)

In this video, teacher Katie Havelda directly teaches science content vocabulary. (Northern Elementary, Lexington, Ky.)

This video was originally part of the multimedia professional development resource Literacy Strategies in Action produced by KET in 2006 in collaboration with the Kentucky Department of Education.

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