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As some of you who follow this blog know, I used to be a high school English teacher. For some of you, that may give you frightening flashbacks of papers covered in red ink, dull recordings of Shakespeare as you fought to stay awake, and your dreaded weekly vocabulary quiz. Ah, the age-old vocabulary quiz. I remember as a student cramming during lunch to walk in and ace my vocabulary quiz for Mr. Smith every single week my senior year. However, I don’t remember a single word he taught us. When I became a teacher myself, I vowed not to be so old school (I sort of chuckle at my younger, more naive self, but she meant well.) I used purple ink instead of red, we acted out a lot of Shakespeare, complete with plastic swords and collapsible daggers, and I decided something had to be better than those old-fashioned vocabulary quizzes. Now, I can’t guarantee that I was beloved by the kids and had them on the edge of their seats, but I can share a thing or two that I learned about vocabulary. Are you ready, homeschoolers? Are you excited? Ok, you’re probably about as excited as my students were when I swore to them that sentence diagramming was fun. (I really think it is!) Just bear with me, though, I promise this is good stuff. What This Former English Teacher Learned About Vocabulary
#1 Workbooks and quizzes don’t work.
Yeah, I said it. Even though I knew this from what I learned in college and personal experience, I still made this mistake with my oldest son. When Luke hit sixth grade, I felt that he had to “get serious” about vocabulary. So I got him a workbook, and he slogged through it. This year, I added tests. When he failed his third test in a row, I wanted to kick myself. I knew better. And, as the saying goes, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing while expecting different results. So I tossed the second workbook with only two lessons completed, and Luke went back to join his brother and sister in their “word a day” program. Before we leave lesson #1, let me say one more thing. Some kids will seem to do fine with a workbook and even ace all their tests. I was that kid growing up. However, these kids are just good at short term memorization. It won’t transfer to long-term knowledge. So before we head to lesson number two, go ahead and toss those workbooks! I’ll wait . . . #2 Students can only learn about five words at a time. This rocked my world when I learned it in my English methods class as a college student. Those lists we all had growing up with 10-20 words on it? We didn’t actually learn them! Study after study has proven this to be true. In the long run, it’s better for your kid to learn an average of one word a day, or five words per week. They will really, truly know those words as opposed to spitting out 10-20 for a quiz then immediately forgetting them. For early elementary, we did a word per day from this book:
There are coloring pages at the end, and we used these to make a book of all our words. We have now finished both volume one and two of this book. Now that my kids are a little older, we are using English from the Roots Up, but we’ll get to that later.
#3 Students retain a new word better if it’s connected to their lives. This is true for us as adults, and it’s true for kids too. When I taught high school, I would introduce five new words in a way the kids could connect to: songs, movies, tv shows, or human interest news articles. The Faith Hill song “This Kiss” uses the word “centrifugal;” an article about the ten year anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain used the word “dissonance,” and the movie Bring it On uses the word “alacrity.” (Um, let me pause and clarify that I do not in any way recommend the movie Bring it On. I actually got in trouble for this as a teacher. I said the word was in the movie, knowing it was popular at the time, but a kid misunderstood, went home, told her parents I said to watch it, they rented it, and well . . . yeah, not good.) Anyways, the point is, connecting the words to these things helped my students remember the words and what they meant. It’s actually easier to do this in your homeschool because you know your students! Just talk about the word, ask if and where they’ve heard it before, and connect it to your child’s life. #4 Students retain a word better if they see it used in context. Reading a definition and reading a word used in a sentence are two completely different things. Therefore, your child’s reading is a great place to learn new words. Some people like to keep a vocabulary journal nearby when their kids are reading so they can jot down any new words that the child learns. There are people who love this, and that’s great. I personally found that it slowed down the pace of our reading too much and took away from the joy of it. When I’m reading with my kids, and we come across a word I think they may not know (or they ask me what something means), I stop, define it, then we just keep on reading. It’s amazing, however, how that simple act embeds that word in their long term memory. Kids who read more have bigger vocabularies - that’s been proven time and again. If you want to be more structured with it, you can find lists of vocabulary words for many, many books either online or in teaching guides. Just remember, again, not to overwhelm your student. Pick just five words from that week’s reading to study more in depth. #5 However, just reading alone isn’t enough. As I share all of this, I don’t want you to think that a strong vocabulary is built by accident. You need something formal to monitor your child’s progress and retention. When I taught high school, I still gave a weekly vocabulary quiz. The quiz was very simple for me to type up because all it had on it was a list of the five words for the kids to define, a space for the kids to choose two of the five words to use in a sentence, and another blank space for them to get extra credit by sharing any new words they had learned that week and where they discovered them. At first, my students freaked out about this type of quiz. It was too hard! I some ways, yes, it was hard. They had to actually know the words! There were no word banks or multiple choice so you could make educated guesses. I admit, even I was nervous that my students would all fail. Amazingly, most of them didn’t. We talked about the words all week, read them in sentences, heard them in songs. By the end of the week, they knew those five words like the backs of their hands. Once, a kid told me, “I will remember what lackadaisical means for the rest of my life.” Mission accomplished. For your homeschool, a quiz like that may not be necessary. Just make sure your child can explain what the words mean and can use them in a sentence. You could do this orally, through a game, or by having them use the words in a story. In our first word of the day curriculum, my kids drew a picture of the word and used it in a sentence. Now, we play games with the words, but I’ll get to that in a minute. #6 Learning Greek and Latin roots will multiply your child’s vocabulary. When I first started homeschooling, I thought this meant my kids had to learn Latin and/or Greek. We did Song School Latin 1 & 2, which was fun, but going beyond that was more than I could handle. As I thought about what was most important about Latin and Greek, I realized it was the way it aids in figuring out the meanings of new words. Therefore, I shifted my focus from studying the languages to learning the roots. Think about it: if you learn one Greek or Latin root, you can figure out the meaning of many, many English words. The workbook I got for my oldest actually used Greek and Latin roots, it just didn’t do so in a memorable way. A dry and dull workbook isn’t the best way to get this foundation. That brings me to . . . How We Do Vocabulary in Our Homeschool
One year, I taught 5th and 6th grade humanities once a week at a homeschool hybrid called Veritas. In that program, we used a book called English from the Roots Up by Joegil Lundquist. I absolutely loved it, so I got it for our homeschool. Unfortunately, it’s no longer in print, so finding it is tough. If you can find it, great! If not, you could also use Rummy Roots or another game called Word-Fact-Oh! Roots. Whatever you use, I highly recommend your children record their roots and the words that they make in a notebook. Here’s what a page in English from the Roots Up looks like:
Greek roots are in green (g=green), Latin roots are in red (Rome = red). The author of the book recommends making index cards with the root on the front and vocabulary words on the back. Because I didn’t want to deal with keeping track of cards, my kids write these down in a special vocabulary notebook. They color the root red or green at the top with the meaning beneath it, then they write the words underneath. A lot of words combine multiple roots, and we write those sort of like math equations. Here’s an example of a page in one of my kids’ notebook:
Here’s the most important part: we only do one word per day with a maximum of five words per week (sometimes less!). I don’t necessarily teach them all the words on each page - some are obsolete or extremely rare. Some roots, we’ll learn only three to five words, other pages we will learn six to eight. But we never do more than five in one week!
Once we’ve learned all the words we want to on one page, it’s time to play. I put the roots on strips of index cards and affix magnets to the back of them. I stick them on our whte board, and the kids are challenged to build words and tell me what they mean. We can play all kinds of variations of games in this simple way. How many days we review this way depends on how quickly my kids master the words. Sometimes we only play for a couple of days, other times we play with our roots and words for an entire week. The point is always mastery, not just covering a long list of words.
So rest in peace, workbooks and weekly quizzes. We don’t need you.
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AuthorHi, I'm Melanie! I'm a homeschooling mom of three kids ages 13, 11, and 9. I have a BS in English Secondary Education from Asbury University plus 30 hours of gifted certification course work. I've taught in just about every situation you can imagine. Public school, private, homeschool hybrid, and private tutoring. The most important thing I've learned? One on one, individualized instruction can't be beat. Archives
July 2022
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