Wonderful Words

I watched a child take a test today that measured verbal ability, and was reminded of a very important fact. Without hearing and seeing a word before, it's impossible to use that word and make it one's own, so to speak. Yet much achievement in school rests on a student's ability to gain a larger and larger vocabulary. Sometimes readers will fly through material but never stop to check the pronunciation of a new word- and so they may develop a larger reading vocabulary than spoken-- able to recognize the word in print but not able to pronounce it correctly in conversation and oral presentations.

Michael Clay Thompson is a researcher and curriculum writer, and in ten years of research he has made a list of the 100 most commonly used words in classic children's literature~ words like repose, vulgar, and resolute~ from books such as Peter Pan and the Call of the Wild. You can find this list at http://www.rfwp.com/samples/100-classic-words.pdf and use a 'word a day' strategy to help children recognize the word whenever they read it or hear it. You can also read a discussion of these words in his book Classic Words, http://www.rfwp.com/2192.htm.

To go even farther and enrich your own vocabulary as well as your child's, check out The 1,000 Most Commonly Used SAT words at http://img.sparknotes.com/content/testprep/pdf/sat.vocab.pdf. This is a great list for middle and high school students in particular to use as they prepare for high-stakes testing. There are also word-a-day calendars with a wide range of unusual words or words within a particular category- just try a search on amazon.com to see several of them.

Quite often, students can improve their vocabulary very quickly if they understand the meanings of roots, suffixes, and prefixes, and there's a great list for those at http://www.betterendings.org/homeschool/Words/Root%20Words.htm.

One fun way teachers have used to describe the way new words 'flavor' your vocabulary is to compare it to ice cream- everyone may like vanilla, but some like to go for the 'chocolate and strawberry words', and even the more unusual flavors to make their writing very interesting! A vanilla word might be walked, but a chocolate word could be traipsed, sauntered, paraded, tramped, or even peregrinated! And if you're trying to describe the color of the chocolate itself, you could choose from amber, auburn, bay, beige, bister, brick, bronze, buff, burnt sienna, chestnut, chocolate, cinnamon, cocoa, coffee, copper, drab, dust, ecru, fawn, ginger, hazel, henna, khaki, mahogany, nut, ochre, puce, russet, rust, sepia, snuff-colored, sorrel, tan, tawny, terra-cotta, toast, and umber (http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/brown)!

(Please, no protests from those whose favorite flavor is vanilla! I've had some delicious, delectable, ambrosial vanilla in my time!)