Since I don't have a vocabulary book or program that I HAVE to follow at my school, I used to always worry if I was doing enough vocabulary instruction. Even when I was theoretically following best practices or authentically investigating words as they came up in texts, I was concerned about if I was really helping my students become better readers.  After a lot of trial and error, I'm now proud of what we do for middle school vocabulary, which falls into four main areas:  Specific Words for Texts and Units  Word of the Week Program (see this post) Vocabulary.com use for differentiation (see bottom of post) Greek & Latin roots instruction ( see this blog post for details) This mix of interaction, instruction, differentiation, and assessment is working for my students better than ever before (and is showing up in their reading scores).  Today, I'm going to share the details of my Word of the Day/Week setup (also known as the Word Nerd Challenge), which is essent......