Research I conducted in preparation for class discussion indicates that "children learned 8 to 12 new root words per week" (Graves et. al, 2013, p. 337). This means that we fill our students with words that they do not understand deeply and cannot remember for an extended period of time. Instead, we should carefully select the words we teach. Basic research on designing effective vocabulary instruction tells us that when selecting words, we need to keep three things in mind: quality over quantity, high utility, and balanced strategies. The first means that instead of teaching our students a plethora of words, we should teach a few words and ensure that the quality of which they know them is high. Second, we need to make sure we choose words that have high utility so that our students can use them often in their daily encounters. Finally, we need to plan for a variety of types of strategies, rather than just dictionaries and tests (Kelley et. al, 2012, p. 6). There are many ways to achieve this, including the gender approach, the tiered approach and the SWIT approach. While all are effective methods, I personally believe the best approach is the SWIT approach. This approach involves four different types of words: essential words, valuable words, accessible words and imported words. By using these four types of words, it becomes clearer exactly which words our students will benefit from. The question then becomes: what exactly are these four types of words? Essential words are words absolutely necessary for understanding the text. Without knowledge of these words, the text will have no meaning. Precious words are words that are very broad and of great use. Especially for young children, valuable words are those that appear often throughout the text. Accessible words are high-frequency words that