Vocabulary Questions

[Homeschooling6]

What do you all use to boost your dc vocabulary? We are currently learning Greek roots. Next year we will learn Latin roots. Wondering if doing Latin & Greek roots is considered vocabulary.

 

When my kiddos took an online assessment they scored pretty low in this area.

 

Thanks!

[jamnkats]

We do a LOT of reading. Well, mostly *I* do a lot of reading. People are always telling me how incredible my kids' vocabulary is (all 4 of them) so I guess that must be it. They have never done any lessons whatsoever but we do read very rich literature constantly. Well, what I consider rich literature.

[hmsch4me]

My son is attending a local homeschool high school and in his English class they are using 500 SAT vocabulary words. She says she focuses on vocabulary because studying roots is one of the reasons kids consistently score low on tests in the voc. section. News to me - we studied roots for the past two years. I think there is value in both, however, after only focusing on roots I found my kids didn't know a lot of basic vocabulary words.

[pianoplayer]

Like someone else already mentioned, we do lots of reading in great literature. When we come to words that our unfamiliar, we stop and explain the terms or have the kids look up the unfamiliar word(s) in the dictionary. We also use the Vocabulary from Classical Roots series in addition to our study of Latin.

[Karen in CO]

We do LOTS of reading, and I make sure to chose books to read to them have a sophisticated vocabulary and complex sentence structure. I try to avoid the more modern and dialog driven stories and focus on stories that are very descriptive. I avoid leveled readers and reading texts.

 

Here is an interesting article about increasing children's vocabularies in schools. http://www.edletter.org/insights/bigwords.shtml.

 

Here is another article.

[Stacia]

Lots & lots of reading (on their own & listening to read alouds), as a few others have already mentioned. When we're reading aloud & I see a word that I guess they may not understand (even if they didn't ask), I have always gone ahead & mentioned what the word means & a synonym for it. I think that has helped a great deal in building their very strong vocabularies.

 

Discussing & debating things also strengthens vocabulary, imo.

 

We've dabbled in studying roots (English from the Roots Up) & enjoy it. I don't know, though, if it has specifically increased their vocabulary prowess, kwim? I think it does help, esp. if you are studying other languages too (learning vocab. in multiple languages, spotting similarities in roots).

 

This year, we're adding Vocabulary Cartoons. We started school this week & the dc thought the cartoons were fun. I challenge the dc (and myself) to try & use the words in our conversation, spot them in things we're reading, etc.... For example, one of the vocabulary words this week was guerrilla. Later in the week, I was reading a chapter from CHOW & we read, "The Philippines were taken only after the American and Philippine soldiers were all either killed or captured, except the few that escaped to the hills, where little bands of men kept on doing what damage they could to the Japanese conquerors." My dd immediately piped up that they were basically guerrilla fighters (per our vocab. lesson). As soon as she pointed that out, we had a short discussion about why that was true (what characterisitics made it true based on the word definition), as a way of reinforcing what we learned.