English from the roots up

[MistyMountain]

I am going through this with two of my kids this summer and will continue on the weekends during the school year. Do you focus on them memorizing the main roots or the roots and all the derivations? I found a quizlet app broken into 25 lessons of four roots within all the derivations too but it takes quite a while to master everything that way. With the app you need to spell right too and that is an issue for my weak speller. It takes him longer with the spelling aspect but maybe it is good practice to see how word derivation from roots are spelled.

[Flowergirl159]

I am using this with my three girls. I introduce a new card and we learn the meaning, then go over the derivatives and have a fun discussion. We usually add three new word cards a week. Each day we review the cards that we have previously learnt, just the word and its meaning is reviewed though. I figure that if they know the word and its meaning, they will be able to pick up meanings of other words that contain that word, without our having to review all the extra info. So for example, when we learned phobia = fear, one daughter came across aqua-phobia in a book she was reading. She knew that aqua meant water and phobia meant fear. So this word is a fear of water. In saying this though, my girls are ages 7, 9 and 11. It may depend on the ages of your children, if they are much older, you may want to include more. But I feel this is plenty for us :)