Yet again, another very busy but well-constructed session from the Research Team at Manaiakalani. Vocabulary is the key to learning. We kicked off by having a korero from Dorothy Burt on vocab growth being directly related to achievement. Many of our learners start school on the back foot. As schools, we have. the job of each child learning 8-10 new words a week, 700 a year and being able to use and understand these words in context. We cannot leave the teaching of vocabulary and decoding to chance. It needs to be planned for. Students need to learn how to explore words - one exposure is not enough. We need to raise children's (and our teachers) lexical bar and find the Goldilocks zone - just right to give some stretch and challenge to their learning. There are four approaches to explicit vocabulary instruction. These are: Build word consciousness Deliberate, robust teaching of words (affixes, base words, contexts) Skills for cracking unfamiliar words Morphology - the s