Creating & reciting sentences with new vocabulary

Learning new vocabulary and creating proper, complete sentences will help your child with speaking, reading, writing, and creating throughout their life.

Introducing your child to challenging vocabulary honors their learning capabilities. Many children will thrive at the challenge of your investing in them and honoring them as a person.

The development of your child’s thinking mind will prepare him for studying more difficult topics and content.

“Reading is the golden key to educational success. It is impossible to be a successful student apart from a mastery of the written word. Researchers are finding that children’s vocabulary–the amount of exposure they have had to a wide variety of words–is possibly the greatest determining factor in their success in all subjects in school.” –Sarah Clarkson, Read For the Heart

BUILDING A BROAD VOCABULARY THROUGH READING TO YOUR CHILD.

Did you know that “children’s books have 50% more rare words in them than does adult prime time television and the conversation between college-educated adults” (Cunningham and Stanovich)? Conversation only provides the most basic and common lexicon to children — they are only taught the most rare words through reading.

“83% of the words in normal conversation with a child come from the most commonly used thousand words” (Trelease).

More words are used in the written language than the spoken language.  Children learn new words through reading.  They will begin to explore and use this new language while speaking themselves! This helps them construct their own oral language.  Their thoughts will become spoken words which helps with building relationships, problem-solving, and communicating with various groups and for different purposes.

“Most theorists are agreed that the bulk of vocabulary growth during a child’s lifetime occurs indirectly through language exposure rather than through direct teaching. Furthermore, many researchers are convinced that reading volume, rather than oral language, is the prime contributor to individual differences in children’s vocabularies” (Cunningham and Stanovich).

Educators have separated sight words into tiers.

• Tier 1 is sight words that we use very frequently in every day speech and life.
• Tier 2 can be found in high-quality reading material, this includes more complex verbs.
• Tier 3 words will appear in subject specific texts as well as high-quality literature.

It is our responsibility, as parents and educators, to mentally train our children to speak and think effectively. We are learning sentence structure, as well as introducing new, fresh vocabulary. Providing them with new, rich vocabulary each passing day, both with the rote practice I am recommending here, and more importantly through reading (and eventually, yes, Latin), will effectively develop and train their minds. Thinking comes easier and more systematically. Approaching new subjects and interests in the future will be greatly enhanced by the work we do with them today (Lowe).

 

Vocabulary Teaching Tools:

Practice creating simple and complex sentences. tart with simple structure and then as they become more confident, you can add more verbs and adjectives as your example.

You share a picture of a pig.

Simple sentence with a noun and verb: The pig is pink.

Complex sentence with a noun, adjective, verb, descriptive adverb and more: The exhausted hog looks tirelessly for a scrap of chewy food.

The above complex sentence respects the child as a person. Children can understand this language, and they will speak it if we model for them. They will catch on and try. Try this as an exercise, and don’t worry if their sentences become “run-ons” while you’re practicing expanding their vocabulary!

You can play vocabulary games or formally teach vocabulary, but truly, the best way to grow a solid vocabulary is to talk, share experiences, and read aloud to them and expose them to high-quality literature. 

How to build strong vocabulary?

1. Talking with your child from infancy about the day and happenings around them.
2. Reading as often as possible. Explaining difficult or new words as they come across in literature.
3. Taking your child to new places and having experiences together and talking about what they are doing or seeing.
4. Playing word games such as Scrabble Jr., Upwards, Boggle Jr., Bananagrams can be a very fun way to incorporate family time with a focus on words and connecting meaning to new words.

Your child will learn to comprehend new words, then use them in their own speech, and finally, begin writing  with their vocabulary. You can help cultivate these through simply spending time with your child! Enjoy these wonder years!

Helping your child to build a strong vocabulary will aid in every aspect of their literacy learning.

This post is Post 8 of 10 in our Learning Language Series. See all of the posts, with Teaching Tools packed into each post, here:

1. What is phonological awareness?
2. Why is rhyming an important language skill? {free nursery rhyme printable}
3. What is phonemic awareness?
4. How can I help my child develop phonemic awareness?
5. How can I teach onsets and rimes?
6. What is the importance of counting syllables in words?
7. How can I help my child create sentences and count words in sentences?
8. How to create a solid vocabulary from infancy?
9. What is phonics and how do we begin reading?
10. How can I help my child grow in language learning before reading?