Entry #10 To bless, address, or press #2

For this bless, address or press I am again to bless a post. I found Jen Cook's Entry #9 awakening because it reminded me how I also learned vocabulary. Like her I also learned in school using spelling lists but can't remember how much we used them in our daily learning. All I remember using them for a pretest on a Monday and then on Friday we took the post test. It was up to us to study at home. I don't think we used them in sentences until I was in the later elementary/ early middle school grades and even that was just a once in a while learning activity. But unlike her I was not a reader; I did everything I could to avoid reading. 

In reading Jen's entry, I wondered how did I learn vocabulary or how could I have done better in school if I was taught using some of the strategies presented in our readings. Would I have been a better reader if I was exposed to more phonics, or more riddles in school. Like I mentioned in the opening paragraph I really only remember using spelling lists, now this could be because I have been out of this part of my life for over 25 years and never really gave it much thought. Maybe we did learn in other ways and the years have pushed those memories so far back that I can't recall them. She was able to recall that she was an avid reader, something I was not and still am not. However, I do like to watch television programs and some movies. Could I have learned using these, where they used unfamiliar words and I was able to pick them up their meanings using visual and auditory cues. The viewing of shows and movies brought me pleasure and introduced me to other vocabularies and words. This would explain my ability to memorize and recite lines from shows and movies. 

There is one thing that I would like to press with both Jen and I; if we had done more fun learning in school, would we have thought of different ways we could have learned vocabulary and been able to also write on those? If we had learned using riddles as it is pointed out in Teaching Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension With Riddles (2008) "to understand and generate verbal humor, a student must exercise metalinguistitc skills (Zipke, p. 131)," would that have made learning fun? Learning with riddles would be fun, it would make learning about words entertaining because riddles are funny. I know that I when I find things funny or entertaining, I am more likely to remember it. 

Zipke, M. (2008). Teaching Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension With Riddles. The Reading Teacher, 62(2), 128–137. https://doi.org/10.1598/rt.62.2.4