Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Vocabulary

Does your child need to expand his vocabulary? Building a good vocabulary is crucial to good reading and writing skills. There are four main types of vocabulary:

  • Reading Vocabulary-the words you recognize when reading
  • Listening Vocabulary-words you recognize when listening to speech
  • Writing Vocabulary-the words you can use when writing
  • Speaking Vocabulary-the words you use in speech
The average student learns about 3,000 words a year, or about eight words a day. Vocabulary is important not only because it helps with reading and writing, but it aids expressions and communication, linguistic vocabulary is synonymous with thinking vocabulary, and folks are often judged by others based on what their vocabulary.

I have my daughter work on vocabulary by playing online vocabulary games and other activities. One activity we do is play the dictionary game. Have one person (the leader) look up a word in the dictionary (something unusual) and write down the definition. The person who looked up the word says the word to the other player who write down a fake definition. They can write a funny definition or a serious one, it doesn’t matter as long as they try to write something believable. The leader then reads each definition, including the real one. Everyone tries to guess what the true meaning is.

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