Teaching Vocabulary without a Curriculum

The fastest way to open up new doors is to close old ones.  Yes, it's really true.  Once I closed the books on the spelling/vocabulary that we'd been working on earlier in the year, bam, a new idea came to me.  { We are only going to take a break from them for a short while. } The thought came to me that we could still do some vocabulary work by just simply taking one hard new word each day and entering them into a little self made dictionary.

First things first.  I gave each girl an empty exercise book:

Then I opened it up and wrote alphabet letters on the tops of each of the pages - thus dividing it up throughout the alphabet.  Most letters got 4 pages each, with a few only needing 2.

I figure this little enterprise will keep the girls going for about 2 years before we need a new exercise book.  Here's my thinking:  40 school weeks and 5 days equal 200 entries.  I'm a bit late to it this year, we're finishing week 11 already, so I figure there's enough room in the books to at least hit the 300 mark, so well and truly into next year some time. 

Then I built my first lot of words for the girls.  They'll just copy out one per day.

Once in their books I can just ask them to give me a sentence { orally } with the word in use.  Not it's meaning, but in context of actual use.

Additionally, each time they come to place a new entry in their book they'll be glancing over the previous entries which will work like a mini review.

A good place to start with finding words is obviously online, but I've also discovered that a quick way to find words is to just a grab a book that you have intentions of having the children read in the future and just go through with a highlighter and voila, you'll have a cool set of high end words to learn.

Once you have your words available you can choose if it's mummy or the child that gets to find the definition.

In the mean time, if you need a head start, just click the worksheet below to download.

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