vocab lists to raise child's reading levels.. from 4th grade to 12th grade.. any idea

[BonAmy]

of resources?

I would love to find something free, online, that I can use immediately! or, if you know of any curriculum, I'd appreciate that too.

 

thanks

BonAmy

[emelsha]

This is a great and free way to learn new words. This online vocabulary builder gives you a word, with a few definitions for you to pick from. The program donates 20 grains of rice to the UN world food program for each correct word. You watch your rice build up while improving vocabulary. The program builds difficulty with correct words.

 

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

[Julie in GA]

I agree with Eliana, and was going to ask if you read aloud to your dc on a daily basis. I'm not talking about picture books, but literature that is above their normal independent reading level. If you aren't comfortable doing this, then audiobooks are good, too. My children seem to engage more if I'm actually doing the reading. This is an incredible vocabulary builder, as you dc will hear new words correctly pronounced, and used in context.

[BonAmy]

thanks for all the suggestion everyone, I appreciate it!

 

This is for my 14 year old son, who is reading at a 4th grade level.. he has a long history of language delays.. and I was even told by an 'expert' that he would never learn to read... etc etc.

 

I do have some great books on tape for him.. the entire Henty series on cd, etc. He just listened to Mysterious Island on cd and read along with it. I also have assigned reading for him each week.. this week it's The Indian in the Cupboard and Treasure Island. I also do SRA reading with him, and some reading/workbooks from Little Giant Steps.

 

What I'm looking for are lists of 4th or 5th grade vocabulary words, for me to sit down with him and work on his pronunciation & reading. I think I can get his reading up to a higher level than it is right now..

 

I like the look of the Rainbow resource books that you guys recommended. I was hoping to find lists of vocabulary words online somewhere, free, that I could just sit down and start with him. I did see the barnes&noble 5th grade vocab. book... surely that's not the only one out there!

 

I also have the 'If it is to be, it's up to me", and I think that will help.

thanks so much,

if you think of anything else... I'm all ears!

BonAmy:bigear:

[jg_puppy]

I wonder if something like Megawords would be a good fit for your goals. I haven't used Megawords, but it is something that I am planning on using next year with my dd to help with increase her spelling, reading, and vocabulary. I haven't used it yet so I can't comment on how well it works, but I have heard many good reviews of the program.

 

Jan

[Penny]

This is a great and free way to learn new words. This online vocabulary builder gives you a word, with a few definitions for you to pick from. The program donates 20 grains of rice to the UN world food program for each correct word. You watch your rice build up while improving vocabulary. The program builds difficulty with correct words.

 

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

 

Thanks!!! This is fun!!!

 

Penny

[Reya]

This is what I've done so far with a kiddo with a combo of auditory processing disorder/dyslexia/dysgraphia. My child is also highly gifted, so that helps a lot. Still, he is now five years old, of pre-K age, and reading at a 6th grade level and 1st grade rate (guess what our next goal is!) (though above the "red flag" LD rate for 3rd grade) and is now very articulate and comprehensible even to strangers. Here, I'll outline what I've done, what I've learned, and what I'm going to do in the future. As soon as I've got the kid to 150 WPM, we'll be cruising. :-)

 

Some background: As an infant, DS NEVER babbled--I mean NEVER--but the first word that he spoke that I understood was a 7 months. (Actually, by then, he had at least two words! I just hadn't recognized them as words because they were SO poorly articulated.) But those first words were incredibly difficult to understand. Ha couldn't hear most ending sounds. He couldn't hear many blends. He could not hear unaccented short words in everyday speech. So while he had his first two-word string at 9 months, he said "foop" and not "food," "ca" and not "cat" at 2--he couldn't even hear the difference between grandma and grandpa! Instead of "I want to go to the store," he'd say "I want a go a store" because that's all he *heard.* (Many kids baby talk. His problems weren't baby talk. He could not distinguish many sounds in ordinary conversation.) These aren't isolated things--this was a pervasive pattern affecting every sentence and most words to the point where people outside the family couldn't understand him more than two years after he'd begun speaking in complete sentences. In fact, he's just now realizing that "tr" is not pronounced "chr"--ditto w/ "dr"/not "jr!"

 

Most therapists won't diagnose speech disorders before the age of 3, which means that--taDA!--you waste the first three years of a child's life if you've got a kid with a disorder that isn't merely mechanical. I knew what was normal and what wasn't and had a pretty darned good idea of how to do therapy--lots of special ed contact here--so I went on my merry little way without a diagnosis and made a lot of progress. But I hit some brick walls because it's hard to make a kid hear what he can't.

 

So, after he was about 3 or so, I began teaching him to read. (He read his first word spontaneously without context on his second birthday and knew all his letters and their sounds but wasn't *reading* at that point.) I did this for a very simple reason: Since it was very hard for him to hear all the words and all the sounds in a word, I figured it'd be easier if he could *see* it to train himself to listen for what he was missing.

 

That worked really well except that, of course, he was dyslexic, like most of my family. :-P (My mother, my brother, and I are all dyslexic to varying degrees.) Sooooo...I got to deal with that, too. Basically, I have a very smart child who had/has partially broken communication channels into that brain. So working around that takes some creativity! Right now, my five-year-old is reading at a 6th grade level (missing roughly 1 in 20 to 1 in 40 words) but at a rate appropriate to mid-1st grade--about 60 CWPM (correct words per minute).

 

My strategy has been mostly to increase his reading level until this point so that his reading and speaking abilities would be even. Now I'm switching over to increasing CWPM.

 

The very first thing that most dyslexic readers need is to be able to get their eyes to focus on one word after another, left to right, and to be able to see the spaces between the words. At first, cutting a window exactly the height of one line of the text and about 8 characters wide works well.

 

Once they can PROCESS the letters and words the next step is, of course, phonics! This is CRUCIAL for many dyslexic readers because so many of them will have a hard time seeing all the letters in a word one after another. They will typically see just a few letters and will guess at the rest. You have to stop this. This is a really devastating habit for dyslexic people to get into, and it can permanently eviscerate their ability to read fluently. Explicit phonics training beyond the typical grade level where it ends is really, really helpful for this, and so is an insistence upon "sounding out" words whenever there is a stumble. You want the default strategy for unknown words to become phonetic, not guessing.

 

Dyslexic kids will struggle in both the two basic measures of reading: grade level and fluency. Grade level is the easier one to deal with. Fluency is harder because it goes back to forcing the brain to not only recognize every letter AND to see spaces between words AND to change this into words, but you have to do this at a rate of several words at a time to be a truly fluent reader.

 

Increasing grade level is pretty straightforward. You can use a simple 2 easy/2 medium/1 hard strategy. If kids only read easy books, then they don't improve their reading level. If kids only read medium books, then they only improve their reading level at a slow rate If kids only read hard books, then they never manage to solidify what they learn, and they get frustrated and crippled.

 

The solution is to have kids read a mix. Out of every five books, two should be below the kid's level, two should be at the kid's level, and one should be above. Depending on the child's level and the age, the below-reading-level can often be accomplished as independent reading. You'll see jumps in reading level following a hard book and then a consolidation during the easy-to-medium books.

 

Something that can really help with accuracy in reading is a good spelling program. Parents of kids who struggle with language often stay away from spelling because a poor program can be such a source of frustration. But my DS ADORES Sequential Spelling. He loves discovering "how words work," as he puts it. With his dysgraphia, I write for him. All About Spelling is another excellent program. It doesn't require writing at all. The reason I went for Sequential Spelling was because it's cheaper and takes less time to implement. *g*

 

Right now, if I were in your shoes, I'd put everything else but math on the back burner and do a minimum of two hours a day in language arts--more likely 2.5. I'd do at least one hour of independent reading (easy-to-medium), forty minutes of oral reading (medium-to-hard), twenty minutes of explicit fluency practice, and the remaining time for grammar, penmanship, vocab, and spelling. (Most 14-y-os won't need penmanship, though.) If this seems hard to squeeze in, remember that he can/should be reading across the curriculum, so he should be reading some of his science and history on his own by a 4th grade reading level.

 

Fluency was/is a HUGE issue with us, of course. When DS began, he was reading five words per minute. He could sound out all the letters. He could blend them without a problem. But even with the window, he could not keep his eyes focused on the letters in order on the page. At 4 years, 2 months, he was reading at about grade level 1.7 or so and 15-20 CWPM. This was, frankly, agony. But the ONLY way to get over dysfluency is to, of course, develop fluency, and so--perseverance! His spoken language improved ENORMOUSLY over this time period as a direct result of his reading retraining his brain to hear words and sounds it had missed before, so that kept me going.

 

Around October, he was reading at a 3rd grade level at 30 WPM. By January, he was at about 4.5 with 40 WPM. Now he's at 6th grade with 60 WPM. We are now doing an hour-ish of reading most days, but I'm going to scale way back on the just-plain-reading and I'm going to ramp up on explicit fluency practice. (He still uses an index card in most books. It's now BELOW the line he's reading, though, not window.)

 

Fluency isn't just about speed. It's about about correct language-modeling, too, which means comprehension. So that's why it's just as important as grade level. There are a number of proven ways to increase fluency. They are:

 

1) Modeling. You read the exact passage he's going to read before he tries it.

 

2) Imitation. He tries to imitate your model either by listening and then trying or reading simultaneously with you. Both strategies help.

 

3) Repetition. He reads the same passage more than once.

 

I've heard of some people advocating above-level texts, but I really can't make sense of this! Either the kid's focusing processing power on fluent reading, pronunciation, and interpretation, or he's figuring out the words. He can't do both.

 

I'm going to use my McGuffey Readers for this. I have a feeling this isn't going to be popular with DS. Oh, well. He can't like everything!

 

BTW, "reading strategies" are used by advanced readers. However, there is NO EVIDENCE that they can be explicitly taught as techniques, much less that they do a lick of good. So don't get drawn in by all those workbooks, and don't start making the poor kid scan a text ahead of time, verbalize strategies, and the like. That makes reading repulsive to a child, and that's going to kill his progress faster than anything. If he reads and comprehends, reading strategies will come. Likewise, studying vocabulary in isolation will do little to nothing for him. A vocab program isn't worthless--especially a roots-based program-but it's not going to have much of an impact on grade level of reading.

 

Less standard ways of helping fluency include requiring that he always use subtitles when watching movies or TV shows (and even maybe turning off the sound!) or encouraging RPGs over other video games because they have so much text. *g* Yes, these ways work, too! My dyslexic/autistic brother FINALLY got his reading rate up above "excruciating" by the use of closed-captioning, and my DS got much faster after he sat on DH's lap for most of an RPG and read along with the text.

[Kareni]

Coming late to this thread ...

 

Yet another vote for http://www.freerice.com/index.php. My 11th grader was introduced to this in an SAT essay writing workshop and loved it.

 

Regards,

Kareni

[Guest hentytapes]

Although not free, I (Jim Hodges of Jim Hodges Audio Books) have produced vocabulary lists that correspond to the the Henty novels. There are 12 lists available as well as 15 unabridged recordings of the Henty novels on my website, http://JimHodgesAudioBooks.com

 

The vocabulary lists are only $3 each, but if you have your son read along with a Henty novel recording (since mine are unabridged), you ought to be able to quiz him on the meaning of the vocabulary words he's just heard in these concise alphabetical lists.

 

Just in case it would help!

[Daisy]

Hey, I found this site just by looking around. I think my kids would like it.

 

http://www.vocabulary.co.il/

[BlessedMom]

You might take a look at these sites:

 

http://www.teach-nology.com/worksheets/language_arts/vocab/

 

 

http://www.syvum.com/squizzes/vocabulary/#s2

[ColoradoMom]

It sounds like you are doing a great job with your current resources! Have you ever looked at the Working with Words series from Pathway Readers?

[NoPlaceLikeHome]

McGuffey Readers have definitions of new words in their reading selections. Webster's Speller 1908 edition has a lot of words with sentences and can be found on Don Potter's web site.

 

 

Here is an interesting speller/definer:

 

http://books.google.com/books?id=k_8RAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA69&dq=morse%2Bspeller&lr=&as_brr=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

http://www.donpotter.net/education_pages/valuable_reading_programs_f.html

[Crimson Wife]

Check your local library for SAT/ACT prep books and photocopy the vocabulary lists in those.

[Mallory]

Would Webster's Speller work?

[wyomingowl]

The nift thrifty fifty was used b my dd in fourth grade. Common words that are often spelled wrong. COuld make good vocab.

 

Also vocabularyvine. This is a web site which deals with roots and also keeps track of progress.

 

I can look up the exact address if you need it.

 

Good luck!

:grouphug:

[Poke Salad Annie]

Mary F. Hyde's Derivation of Words is free at googlebooks.com. It could be used over several years.

[leann_in_tx]

You might be interested in Natural Speller by Kathryn Stout. It only goes through 8th grade, but it's a good resource for spelling words by grade level. I have not used it, but I was reading about some of her other books for a while and saw a lot of positive reviews for this one. I think rainbow resource carries it as well.

 

Here's a link:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Speller-Kathryn-L-Stout/dp/1891975005