Vocabulary Shmabulary

By Sandra

I recently finished teaching an SAT Prep Class at our local community college. I drilled and lectured 20 high school students who signed up for the course, in effort to help them raise their test scores, to know more about what to expect on the test, and to reduce their test anxiety.

What I discovered was that much of the mastery of the test is linked to learning essential root words, stems, prefixes, and suffixes, which aid in reading comprehension and vocabulary in context. The lists of these word parts, which often have their origins in Latin, were not well known by the students in my class.

In light of this, I plan to continue to use a resource called Vocabulary from Classical Roots (Educators Publishing Service), with my own children this year. I’ve used this vocabulary book with my middle school child for a few years. This year I’ve introduced the book to my fourth grade student as well.

The structure of the lesson goes as follows: The theme of the unit is discussed. For example, if the theme is “Moving Toward Numbers,” it would explain that the root mot means “to move or to do,” as in the word motion. Also the root numer, as in numeral, means “number.” Students identify the root parts that have been introduced in several other words. Then a full list of vocabulary words with these roots is covered in the lesson. After the word list, which provides pronunciation, the part of speech and definition, the student practice exercises are provided. There are usually 3 or 4, possibly one for each day of the week, after introducing the word list.

I highly recommend this series of vocabulary books, because they teach the tools for figuring out word meanings. There is no way one could memorize all the definitions from an SAT study guide. But the tools provided in this vocabulary series equip students, at young ages, to identify roots, stems, prefixes and suffixes and their meanings. It’s another key to unlocking more learning pathways on the road to graduation.