Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Vocabulary Using WordBuild.

My daughter loves vocabulary.  She feels the more words she learns the smarter she is.  It’s been a strange thing to me how many words she wants to know.

When Dynamic Literacy offered WordBuild: Elements, Level 1 Set (Includes WordBuild the Game) for review I was very grateful to be able to receive it for her.

 

About The Company:

Dynamic Literacy is a company that is based on frequently used Latin and Greek roots. The program is a collection of educational materials designed to communicate the structure of the English language to students of all ages.

About The Product:

WordBuild: Elements, Level 1 Set (Includes WordBuild the Game) 

This set includes 3 main things:

**Elements 1 Teachers Edition - a 336 page guide which includes:

• Fun facts and alerts about each root
• Guidance for how to use each exercise
• Exercise answer keys
• A weekly “check-up” for each root
• Units that review every prefix and suffix used
• A mini-dictionary for each of the 25 roots
• A comprehensive and a mid-term assessment
• A free on-line account to the Dynamic Literacy website for bonus content

**Student Activity Book - a 156 page workbook that covers 25 Latin & Greek Root Families. This book contains four activities for each root, plus appendices with practice activities for prefixes and suffixes, and even root bingo game boards.

**WordBuild the Game Looking for some fun? WordBuild the Game illustrates the formula WORD = Prefix +Root + Suffix with movement, music, and entertaining feedback.

The way of teaching Dynamic Literacy uses a simple process of learning.

Learn 3 roots.

Learn 3 prefixes.

Learn 3 suffixes.

Put them together and you learn 48 words. 

This is better explained here.

A day/week in our life:

Each Day for about 15 minutes Emily would work in Elements.

For a sample of the daily worksheets from both the teacher and student book see here.  We followed the plan pretty much as written.  Each day was written out simply in the teachers manual.  Each work page she was supposed to do that day was made clearly. She would just do the days work.  When it said for the teacher to write down the word on the board, I didn’t.  We would just discuss it like the book said. 

Our thoughts and feelings:

At first Emily was not enjoying this.  She felt overwhelmed.  I had her keep at it and she soon realized that she was learning new words faster than her word of the day calendar or any other way.  She was learning words at a rate of about 50 per week.  She was retaining the words better due to the fact that they are taught as based around a root word.

This program is generally recommended for children in grades 6-12.  She is in 8th/9th grade and this fit her previous knowledge.  She is not only learning words and their definitions, she is able to use them in a sentence correctly. 

To see what others think of this check out this post. To see a wide variety of reviews check out our crew blog.

 Review Crew


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