Vocabulary For Life

The previous post, “What Reading Level Are We On?”, offered several methods for assessing your child’s progress in literacy.  It also provided a perspective on how to determine your child’s interest in physical books.  If you read those posts but found those methods too general in nature, I’ve provided the interactive chart above as a more direct method.  To access the chart, click here (if you are using your phone, you may have to turn it sideways to see “Suggested Vocabulary by Grade”.

By clicking on the circles, the chart will reveal suggested vocabulary words by grade.  Consider using these words to see how many of them your children know now.  The clickable levels are organized by grade and then word length.

This vocabulary list was created by the Berkeley (California) Unified School District.  They offer them in a publication that you can review by clicking here.  In addition to the vocabulary, they also offer different ways to test a student’s knowledge of each word.  Those ways include seeing whether the student can connect words with similar concepts, talk about a context in which certain words would be used, and of course, using them in sentences.  It should be noted that other organizations sell boxes of SAT word flashcards which outnumber what’s offered here.  The words in this set should be considered a baseline.

Lifelong educator and scholar, Edmund Gordon, often referred to the education students received in terms of “assets”.  I will pick up on his work in future posts, but here, his metaphor lends itself to the possibility of considering each newly acquired word to be like a gem in a rock collection.  Over time, the collection shall grow in value.