2/12/03
Have you ever examined a vocabulary program that you really liked? Neither had I. That's why I designed Word Web Vocabulary, a program that makes connections between words, enriches every lesson with graphics and presents a host of interesting features.
As a classroom and English teacher for many years before I founded The Banner School in Frederick, Maryland, I became aware of how few commercial vocabulary programs there were. Those that I found reminded me of the lists of twenty unrelated words I'd been handed when I was in school on a Monday and told I should know their definitions by Friday. For a vocabulary program to be successful, I reasoned it needed an overall plan.
As a curriculum specialist, I knew that lessons had to engage students in the learning process and that they had to be challenging for students at different instructional levels and from various backgrounds. From my experience teaching children of all ages, I knew that vocabulary words if presented in an appropriate manner could be enjoyed by even the youngest school child, which is why Word Web Vocabulary will work with students as early as third grade (or younger). With the further understanding that Greek and Latin roots would help students decode unknown words, I began to build my program -very much as you see it today.
However, like most other teachers, I had little time to devote to a new element in the curriculum, so I devised a way to work each week's words into all the other components of our language arts - or, as it turned out, almost the other way around! The required weekly sentence writing that went with learning the week's vocabulary words coaxed reluctant writers to become more confident and productive. Students incorporated the week's spelling words into their sentences, along with the elements of style, mechanics, grammar and figures of speech that we had studied. To assure continuous review, many of each week's sentences contained words from previous lessons.
The results were all I could hope for. Students enjoyed the challenge and showed off their newly-learned architectural terms to their parents and older siblings, while their scores on standardized tests improved. Best of all, I could see them awakening to the world of words.
