Comments

I didn't know they kept going after the color (elementary school) ones!

Sign me up. After watching two kids prep for SATs, I'm convinced that early direct instruction of vocabulary is totally worthwhile. And Sadlier Oxford makes it easy -- Ben can do it on his own without help from me.

-- CarolynJohnston - 26 Jul 2006

Not, of course, that he doesn't complain loudly.

-- CarolynJohnston - 26 Jul 2006

These are fantastic books - incredible.

I discovered today that Christopher has slacked off a bit, so he's going to be picking up the pace.

I'm reading the "Robust Vocabulary Instruction" book - naturally it turns out that in real life it's difficult and inefficient to try to learn vocabulary entirely from context.

Who would have thought?

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jul 2006

It's amazing to me how ingrained the natural-learning meme is.

I don't believe it for a minute, and yet I was cruising along assuming kids "pick up" vocabulary from "reading a lot."

Well, yeah. As it turns out, they do pick up vocabulary from reading a lot.

But not nearly as much and not nearly as accurately as they would if you actually taught them vocabulary.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jul 2006

Are you guys doing the blue book?

I wonder if Christopher knows all the words in it. I started with Level A just because he's in middle school....

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jul 2006

Here's a bunch of data on how many words kids need to be learning each year.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jul 2006

One of my "two kinds of people" rules is:

• People who can look up a single word in a dictionary.
• People who are invariably distracted by all the shiny, new words on every page every single time the book is opened.

Once I could use a dictionary, my dad always pointed me at one when I had a word-meaning question. In retrospect, it was a pretty efficient method of teaching vocabulary for me.

-- DougSundseth - 26 Jul 2006

People who are invariably distracted by all the shiny, new words on every page every single time the book is opened.

LOL!

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jul 2006

People who are invariably distracted by all the shiny, new words on every page every single time the book is opened.

Guilty.

-- GoogleMaster - 27 Jul 2006

My latest time sink:

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage

Nearly 1000 pages of excellent articles on usage debates.

BTW, from this book's article on "number":

1. All commentators agree that the plural verb in the first example that follows is correct, and so is the singular verb in the second:

"Current statistics already show that, of the unemployed, a large number are illiterate" [citation omitted]

"the number of foreign-language and second-language users together adds up to 300 to 400 million" [citation omitted]

(Which pretty much answers your usage question from a couple of weeks ago.)

-- DougSundseth - 28 Jul 2006

Speaking of, "Ooh, shiny!"

8-)

-- DougSundseth - 28 Jul 2006

IMHO, lots of mistakes in Wordly Wise.

-- VerghisKoshi - 28 Jul 2006

Hi, Verghis!

oh, that's not good

I've never looked at one of the books; I've just seen them in catalogues.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Aug 2006