| The First 4,000 Words Vocabulary Building Program Selected By Hillview Crest Elementary to Boost Student Vocabulary |
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| Written by Nell Kauls | |||
| Thursday, 18 February 2010 20:28 | |||
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Hillview Crest Elementary School, in the New Haven Unified School District in Hayward, California, has selected The First 4,000 Words vocabulary building program to help students boost their vocabularies. Hillview Crest students will engage in 355 interactive and individualized web-based lessons that teach the 4,000 most frequently used English words. This research-based and field-tested program helps students develop the necessary reading skills to succeed in school. By enabling students to build their listening and reading vocabularies, the program supports Hillview Crest Elementary's literacy goals. In field tests, students using The First 4,000 Words program have shown vocabulary gains regardless of grade-level or gender. Students also found the program to be appealing, easy to use, and fun. Teachers also reported that the program was engaging and easy to use. Seward Inc. developed The First 4,000 Words program with noted reading expert Dr. Michael Graves, Professor Emeritus of Literacy Education at the University of Minnesota. His research interests and areas of expertise include vocabulary development, comprehension instruction, and strategy instruction. Additionally, the words in the program were selected from the most frequent words in The Educator's Word Frequency Guide (Zeno et al. 1995) and the 4,000 word families of Hiebert's Word Zones™ corpus. Please visit The First 4,000 Words web site for more information: www.thefirst4000words.com. About The First 4,000 Words The First 4,000 Words is an interactive web-based program used to teach the 4,000 most frequently used English words to English Language Learners and struggling readers in grades 1 through 4. Students access their lessons through an engaging world of words called the Vocabitat. Animated woodland characters guide the students through the lessons, which use game-like scenarios and speech recognition technology to teach, reinforce, and assess vocabulary listening, reading, and pronunciation—all vital to a reader’s success. Lessons are available from any Internet-connected computer with little teacher time required beyond initial student setup. Students complete each lesson independently.
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