My school has spent countless hours using professional development to better understand English Language Learners and students of Poverty.  After studying both of these areas there has been a reoccurring theme, vocabulary development.  In both professional development sessions it was obvious to me that students of poverty are exposed to way less vocabulary than students of middle class and high class students.   In our professional development of understanding English Language Learners we found that vocabulary in English is a hurdle that students must overcome to better understand the books they read, the things their teachers are talking about, and the class assignments in general.  Over the course of my graduate work vocabulary has been an area of focus for me.  I have seen time and time again the need for explicit vocabulary instruction.  With my own understanding of a need I see at my school I wanted to conduct a true needs assessment of the entire school.  According to McCawley (2009)  “a needs assessment provides a method to learn what has already been done and what gaps in learning already exists.” (p. 2)

Using the information we learned at our many professional development sessions of ELL and students of poverty I took an opportunity during a team meeting to discuss the need for vocabulary instruction.  My team and I discussed informally the need for more explicit vocabulary instruction for Kindergarten students who come to school with little background knowledge or exposure to tier I vocabulary words.  The conversations spanned over two PLC team meetings and when looking at our progress monitoring books we realized that students struggled more with content words such as swan, sea star, puddle, etc.  than other words. So as a team we decided to implement more vocabulary instruction into our day and provide more picture support for our students learning these new words.