1/16/07

A New Year, New Words

January has always been my favorite time of the school year. Everyone — students, teachers and parents — is familiar with classroom routines, and fewer events occur to distract us from the tasks at hand. We can all settle down for the long haul toward spring and the end of the school year.

By now, the regimen of Word Web is firmly established with all users, so that students can begin to do superior work. You can encourage your students to write more sentences containing their vocabulary words than they have in the past. Students should also be able to handle more Think Links and Delve Deepers.

One way students may delve deeper without doing research is to rip headlines from the news and write imaginative explanations for them. For instance, our paper today had a headline “Portal to the Past.” A subhead explained “National Archives Houses the Nation's Treasures.” Without the subhead, students could put their spin on such headlines. It would be interesting to read the interpretations students would give them!

Not only can headlines inspire new thoughts, the daily news is adding new words to our language. “Neocon” is one, a political word combining neo (new) with (con)- servative. Volume III users should add this to Lesson 8’s NEO- page. In fact, new words are entering our vocabulary at a fast pace. A macaca has become “an American citizen treated as an alien.” “To pluto” fall from the skies to mean “to demote or devalue someone or something,” much like what happened to the former planet last year. So we now might say, “I was plutoed from my job.”

We’ll just have to wait and see whether these will have any staying power.

We’re also seeing more frequent use of words that were often reserved for advanced readers. Unilateral (obligating only one of two or more parties, nations, or persons, as a contract or an agreement) and unilateralism are examples. A few years ago, these were concepts fairly difficult to explain to students, even older ones, but now, they are rather “in our faces.”

Think back just a few years to when Internet was a new word. The publisher of Merriam-Webster dictionaries chose this as the word of the century because he felt “no other word has become part of people’s lives so quickly or has had such an impact.” No only has Internet swept into the American vocabulary, it has spawned many other new words: netizen, chat room and home page, just to name a few.

I love the wonderful world of words, and please keep in mind that the main difference between Word Web Vocabulary and all other programs is that students become immersed, not just exposed to, word study.

That’s my word this time.

Ellie

Word Web Vocabulary - recommended on Heidi Hayes-Jacobs' website - Moving vocabulary from the edge of language arts to its center