Beth in Central TX -- question about the sp/vocab

[Mom2legomaniacs]

We started doing the words like I mentioned last week from SWO. I am having him look up the word, part of speech, definition, and copy a sentence I looked up from the quotes page you mentioned. I am having him do 5 words a day. How long does this take in your house? This is taking him FOREVER! Of course, other things are taking him a while too given his spacey head this past week.
Is there something I can do to help speed him up on this? I think it is a great exercise but I do have other subjects to cover too! KWIM? Or do your boys work more efficiently than mine does. Maybe it is just temporary but I hate how long it takes for him to look up a word in the dictionary. When I drill him, he *can* go faster. Anything you can offer up for this?

thanks!!

[Beth in Central TX]

This activity is included in our CW "hour", so I don't know how long it takes for just this one part. However, your son is young, so you may want to build up to 5 words a day. Maybe start with 3, and have him alphabetize them first so that he's not going back and forth through the dictionary. My middle son really struggles with dictionary work. I've seen improvement over the past year with the review work he does in R&S spelling and the vocabulary work he does in CW. However, finding words in a dictionary is just not intuitive for him. He's had to work at it, and it's just now becoming a little more automatic, but he's at the end of his 5th grade year. So I would start slow with 2-3 words and provide lots of guidance in the beginning. As he gains speed, you can add more words. Right now my 5th & 6th grader are doing 4-5 words a week with CW.

HTH!

[Mom2legomaniacs]

That might be more doable that way. What might be a good idea is to go through the list on the first day and talk about the words a bit. I can then choose the ones that he is less familiar with to do these activities.

He is not naturally quick at looking up things in the dictionary either. He can do it, he just seems to be piddling along sometimes.

You are doing 5 words a WEEK not 5 words a DAY? Maybe that's my problem. I had assigned him 5 words each day!

[Beth in Central TX]

Vocabulary analysis in CW is done on day 2 each week; the workbook suggests about 10 words, and I assign about 5. I think 5 words a day for 5 days a week is a bit much. I would scale back to 2-3 words that require more in-depth study. Walk him through the dictionary process; talk about the letter it begins with, where that is in the alphabet, and how that corresponds to the dictionary. I took this step for granted because it seemed like common sense, but DS#2really needed a lot of guidance to learn how to do this one his own.

I also did some dictionary drill (like Bible drill). I would call out random words, and DS would try to open the dictionary to the beginning letter of the word I said. I didn't have to do this with my oldest son, so for us it was a skill that one just knew, and the other needed to learn and practice. We had the same issue with multiplication tables.

[Mom2legomaniacs]

Thanks! I have found that out the hard way. He is not complaining, but it is clear I over-assigned! I will definitely scale way back.

He has gotten much better with using a dictionary but still needs a bit of work. I worked with him earlier on this trying to figure out where his issues might lie. I, too, thought it was fairly common knowledge, but realize I need to work with him much more on this skill.

Thanks again. I think I have a good idea of what to do and how to accomplish this. I will scale back considerably on this. Once again, you have helped me out.