I love words. As an old English major, I have a deep-seated passion for words and books and language. So, with that bias, I think one of the great gifts we can give our kids is a well-developed vocabulary. A vast and retrievable vocabulary doesn’t just help our kids do well on those state benchmark tests and college entrance exams, I think it also contributes to being good conversationalists, socially comfortable, and more literate people overall.
When was a young girl, I used to visit my great-grandmother about once a week. She was an often-crabby, opinionated woman who lived alone after having divorced my great-grandfather after fifty years of marriage. She loved her books, newspapers and puzzles–as well as led an active life in her garden and tending her cattle and multi-acre property. When I would visit, she would quiz me from the “Vocabulary” quiz that was buried in the pages of “Reader’s Digest”–it was a multiple-choice style quiz and they would list 10-12 words and give you choices of what the meanings were. For an eleven-year-old, I hadn’t even heard most of the words she’d query me on, but I wanted to impress her with my capabilities so I’d certainly try. If I could, I’d sneak a peak at the quizzes before she got a chance to test me and try to commit some to memory.
Now I don’t quiz my own kids out of “Reader’s Digest” but I have tried to use a variety of words and help them expand their vocabulary playfully and naturally since they’ve been tiny. I think kids have a natural curiosity about language and words–they sound fun, they have purpose and power–it doesn’t take much to foster and encourage that natural curiosity. One of the things I loved about the “Harry Potter” books was the great expansive vocabulary–reading those books sent my kids to the dictionary more than once and when the first few books came out, my son was quite young so I got to read them out loud to him–we had many conversations about the words and the vocabulary (The “Chronicles of Narnia” books are great vocab builders too).
Now, as teenagers, one of the comments I get from their teachers (and hear their friends tease them about) is how articulate they all three are and what great vocabularies they have. I can’t help but beam a little bit that one of my parenting efforts seems to have come to fruition. And, I still believe there’s power in a rich vocabulary.