Links to help learning the international phonetic symbols:
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What is the vocabulary project?
- This is a weekly cumulative vocabulary development project that will continue every Friday through the entire semester. Students are responsible to find their own challenging vocabulary words, create blue index card entries for each and keep studying them throughout the semester. They will be tested individually on Fridays.
- See the dictionary links above.
- Never use dictionary.com.
- You have through Thursday of the following week to come in before or after school, lunch or brunch, but beware. If Mrs. H. gets sick and is not available, you are out of luck.
- You have one pass to make up a vocabulary test for the points earned.
- No. You should be finding the words and practicing them every day. Ten minutes daily will do more for you than sixty minutes once a week.
- Mrs. H. has Irlen Syndrome. The glare off white cards gives her a headache. Since she has to test kids for 5 hours on Fridays any help to ward off the migraine is desperately needed. That is also why the lights are not all turned on in the class.
- You pay attention to what your parents say, what you read, what we study in class and you find words in context that you aren't familiar with.
- You can use the words that come from the SAT Lists, or Word of the day from various dictionaries. Just make sure the words have full sentences provided, and that you have the pronunciations that use the actual symbols.
- You start with the sentence where you found the word.
- Then you go to the dictionary and find the meaning and part of speech that match the way you see it used in the sentence.
- If Mrs. H. uses a word in an assignment, test, in her instructions you can use it for your cards as long as it is not one of our literary terms. Just ask her how to spell it.
- http://www.vocabtest.com/
- http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ (on this page is a matching game that will link you to the words and sentences for them.)
- https://www.merriam-webster.com/
- http://www.majortests.com/sat/wordlist.php
- http://www.vocabulary.com/top1000 satwords.html
- It is often confusing to try to guess how the word is used properly just from the definition. Remember the story of the girl who found that "cudgel" meant "a club" but thought it was a place you go dancing. WRONG - it is a big gnarly stick used to beat people up. It would have been obvious if she had seen it in context.
- If you start from the sentence in context - not from a random dictionary entry, you are copying how it is actually used correctly instead of guessing.
- Of course, that is why I put them there. I sometimes purposely use a more complex word just to provide you with this opportunity.
- Pick something harder to read - classic literature, the opinion section of a major newspaper, actually check out the words that you gloss over but don't actually know. You might be surprised at some words you have ignored up to now. If they mean exactly what you thought they did, skip on to something you don't already know.
- No. If you recognize it and understand it when you see or hear it and you could use it yourself accurately then it is a class one word. Why waste your time and mine?
- NO. Specialty words that only turn up in certain classes, or the names of obscure animals, fish, currency or plants are class three - NO, you may not use them.
- Yes, just watch out for the context. Does your list give you sentences? If not, you better be able to come up with some pretty good ones or ask Mrs. H for help.
- side one (the un-lined side)
- sentence
- definition
- side two (lined side)
- word (not capitalized unless it ALWAYS must be capitalized, and written 2 lines tall.)
- pronunciation (not just the word broken into syllables)
- part of speech as it is used in the sentence.
- Your initials and class period.
- You can add other forms of the word when you learn that it changes in another part of speech. eg. civil (adj) civility (noun) civilize (verb) Don't create additional cards using different forms of the same word.
- side one (the un-lined side)
Longer Explanation
(For the sake of convenience I will use the old-fashioned practice of using the singular masculine to refer to all people rather than the awkward “he/she” or the annoyingly inaccurate “they”)
The student is able to go to the class website and actually look at the above powerpoint again so that if he missed anything he can catch it the second time around. He needs to add ten new words every week except Thanksgiving and Fall Break. The total number of cards is listed on the class log on every Friday that we test. Basically this first week he needed ten. Next week he needs to have added ten new ones, so his accumulated stack will be twenty. The next week, ten more, and so on. By the end of the semester he will have about 140 words. Each week that we test, I randomly pick 10 cards out of the stack and ask him a question about one thing on the card. Those questions are listed in the powerpoint and in the handout.
Students come with very different levels of vocabulary and exposed to different categories. For example, I am a farmer's daughter, so all the agricultural terms that are familiar to me are like Greek to these city-raised students. Basically, the students choose their own words from the sources they are exposed to. It can be the High School appropriate book he has chosen to read each Tuesday and Thursday or our textbook. If he reads a newspaper and finds a word he doesn't know he can use that. Words can come from words I use in class, with the exception of the actual literary terms. If you use a word at home that he doesn't know he could ask you how to spell it and ask for your help to use it in a sentence. What I do NOT want him to do is look for random words in the dictionary. There are thousands of words he does not know that he will never even encounter outside of that dictionary. Why waste time with obscure words when there are words in his environment that he needs to learn?
Ideally he is using the original sentence where he found the word or at least adapts his sentence from that so that he is imitating the correct use of the word rather than making up a sentence that he is just guessing at and misuses the word because he doesn't really understand it. For example, I have often had to correct or clarify things like assuage, which means to calm or pacify but is used only with the feeling being calmed, not the person. You assuage guilt or pain. You do not assuage your little brother. As an adult with greater language experience you can also help him to adapt the sentence so that it includes context clues to help with memorizing the meaning but leaves out extra things that would only be confusing out of context.
To find the pronunciations the student should be using a high level standard dictionary. If you do not have a really good college level dictionary at home there are 3 excellent online dictionaries listed above. Please do not ever, ever, ever use dictionary.com. If is often inaccurate. He should also be figuring out the part of speech from the sentence. The dictionary may tell him a variety of possible parts of speech but not which to choose here. If there is a suffix involved the part of speech is likely to have changed to something entirely different from the root word.
The exact form of the word, including any plural endings or suffixes, must be used on the front of the card. It should not be capitalized unless it is a proper noun, or based on a proper noun, such as American, where it is ALWAYS capitalized no matter what. The pronunciation must reflect the pronunciation including those any suffixes. The students do not always see the importance of that until they encounter words like satisfy and satiate or sage and sagacity or caprice and capricious where the suffix changes the whole rhythm and pronunciation until they barely sound like they are related. The definition must also match exactly the meaning of the word as it is used in the sentence. If the card is incorrectly done, such as the word misspelled or capitalized when it is not needed, or the definition, part of speech and sentence not matching, the card is considered wrong and the possible point is lost.
The student is able to go to the class website and actually look at the above powerpoint again so that if he missed anything he can catch it the second time around. He needs to add ten new words every week except Thanksgiving and Fall Break. The total number of cards is listed on the class log on every Friday that we test. Basically this first week he needed ten. Next week he needs to have added ten new ones, so his accumulated stack will be twenty. The next week, ten more, and so on. By the end of the semester he will have about 140 words. Each week that we test, I randomly pick 10 cards out of the stack and ask him a question about one thing on the card. Those questions are listed in the powerpoint and in the handout.
Students come with very different levels of vocabulary and exposed to different categories. For example, I am a farmer's daughter, so all the agricultural terms that are familiar to me are like Greek to these city-raised students. Basically, the students choose their own words from the sources they are exposed to. It can be the High School appropriate book he has chosen to read each Tuesday and Thursday or our textbook. If he reads a newspaper and finds a word he doesn't know he can use that. Words can come from words I use in class, with the exception of the actual literary terms. If you use a word at home that he doesn't know he could ask you how to spell it and ask for your help to use it in a sentence. What I do NOT want him to do is look for random words in the dictionary. There are thousands of words he does not know that he will never even encounter outside of that dictionary. Why waste time with obscure words when there are words in his environment that he needs to learn?
Ideally he is using the original sentence where he found the word or at least adapts his sentence from that so that he is imitating the correct use of the word rather than making up a sentence that he is just guessing at and misuses the word because he doesn't really understand it. For example, I have often had to correct or clarify things like assuage, which means to calm or pacify but is used only with the feeling being calmed, not the person. You assuage guilt or pain. You do not assuage your little brother. As an adult with greater language experience you can also help him to adapt the sentence so that it includes context clues to help with memorizing the meaning but leaves out extra things that would only be confusing out of context.
To find the pronunciations the student should be using a high level standard dictionary. If you do not have a really good college level dictionary at home there are 3 excellent online dictionaries listed above. Please do not ever, ever, ever use dictionary.com. If is often inaccurate. He should also be figuring out the part of speech from the sentence. The dictionary may tell him a variety of possible parts of speech but not which to choose here. If there is a suffix involved the part of speech is likely to have changed to something entirely different from the root word.
The exact form of the word, including any plural endings or suffixes, must be used on the front of the card. It should not be capitalized unless it is a proper noun, or based on a proper noun, such as American, where it is ALWAYS capitalized no matter what. The pronunciation must reflect the pronunciation including those any suffixes. The students do not always see the importance of that until they encounter words like satisfy and satiate or sage and sagacity or caprice and capricious where the suffix changes the whole rhythm and pronunciation until they barely sound like they are related. The definition must also match exactly the meaning of the word as it is used in the sentence. If the card is incorrectly done, such as the word misspelled or capitalized when it is not needed, or the definition, part of speech and sentence not matching, the card is considered wrong and the possible point is lost.