Vocabulary Building

STUDYING WORDS DIFFERENTLY

click on the book to look inside

By sheer coincidence I came across the book, Painless Vocabulary being sold by a local homeschooler. I bought it on impulse and am so glad that I did. Alhumdolillah. It's a wonderful resource and activity book for middle schoolers.

After going through the book I have come up with a format on how I intend to cover this book with Lil Muallim # 1, starting today Inshallah! If I make any changes I will update my post here. 

Here's the plan:

The book has 20 chapters and each one introduces you to 15 interesting words. The word study is further divided into groups of 5. That obviously made a bell in my ear..... 5 a day (haha! I am applying the wonderful Math on the Level concept in our vocabulary study). This means that we do 1 chapter a week including the exercises at the end of each one.

So first of all, I wrote down the 15 words on an index cards and divided them in groups of 3, ready for Lil Maullim # 1 to use. 

On the back of the cards, I wrote 3 headings. p.s.: (part of speech), synonyms, antonyms and other word  forms, with an abbreviation of their part of speech, where applicable. This will be required to be filled by Lil Maullim # 1.

STEP 1

Lil Maullim # 1 will be asked to read the short essay...aloud or quietly would be his choice.

STEP 2

He will then pick out the 1st five vocabulary word cards and read them separately and take a mini spelling test of the days 5 words. 

STEP 3

 Point out what part of speech the word belongs to and any synonym or antonym he can think of for that word.

STEP 4

He will go through his thesaurus and fill in the back of the index cards as required. This exercise will surely strengthen his vocabulary  as he will encounter different intensities of the same word and hopefully use them suitably, Inshallah.

STEP 5

Make a sentence with each of the words. 

At the end of the lesson, I hope to go over the sentences with him and discuss if he feels the sentences can be improved in any way or if another word from the synonyms he found would be a better choice according to the context. etc. The method of review of written work is one we have adapted from Fred Lybrands, The Writing Course. 

Details and review of this course will be on another post Inshallah.

Ooooo! I am excited, can't wait for today's lesson. :)


DAY 1 REPORT!!!!


Ok so our 1st lesson went pretty smoothly Alhumdolillah! We did upto step 4. I will ask  Lil Muallim 3 1 to do step 5 later in the day today Inshallah!


Here's how the back of the cards look after being filled...........

Looking forward to the sentences........... :)