How to improve vocabulary

Advice on 11 Plus VR papers and problems

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Guest

How to improve vocabulary

Post by Guest »

My son may be taking the 11+ next year, in Buckinghamshire, which has only verbal reasoning papers. It seems a bit early yet to start proper preparation for it, but I thought perhaps he could do a bit of work on improving his vocabulary in the mean time.

Can anyone recommend suitable workbooks? In particular, I see that the following series of books has positive reviews on Amazon (and is available from this site).

11+ Spelling and Vocabulary Workbooks for Children
by Stephen Charles Curran, Warren J Vokes

Would these be useful, and if so can anyone suggest roughly which of the 12 books would be suitable for him to start on? We have started looking through Patricia's vocabulary list, and he knows about 80 percent of the words in the first two columns.
Rita

Improving Vocabulary

Post by Rita »

I encouraged my son to read lots. He went through a phase where he hated reading but I persevered and something suddenly clicked when he found a book he loved. Reading is the best method of improving vocabulary. How can children write good fiction if they haven't read good fiction? He was asked in the 11+ interview what he was reading and the interviewer even prompted him to name the author. My son passed the 11+ and he came from a state school. I tutored him myself.

Now my daughter is going to sit the exam next year. I read with her just so we can work our way through books quicker. I'll read a page and then her. I can also explain vocabulary as we go along and we read together every night.
Nou
Posts: 198
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2005 12:55 pm

Post by Nou »

The company that produce the books above which I think is AE Tuition (?)have a website where you can view and download actual pages from the book - that might help in deciding which level he is at. If you look in the Tips section of the forum there are some useful ideas there and wordlists.
Riz

Post by Riz »

Both Susan Daughtery and AE produce vocabulary books:

http://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/books/list.php?g=f&p=7

http://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/books/ ... p?g=f&p=11

Letts, Bond etc also do a series but they are not availble on this website.
KE Mum

Post by KE Mum »

Hi Guest

I would definitely agree with Rita that reading is the best way to improve vocabulary - you have lots of time still so encourage him to read books that he likes - the Dr Who books are very good, as are Anthony Horowitz.

Although you can teach children words through word lists, it is very hard for them to remember them all for any period of time unless you use them too.

My eldest child was a reluctant reader, so one way that we got over this was to put them to bed at night and say - if you read you can have your light off 10 minutes later, otherwise it goes off now. It is incredible how much difference 10 minutes can make!
Guest3

Words

Post by Guest3 »

I would agree that reading is much the best but if you have a child who hates to read and struggles with it as I do you might find this usefull too.

We have a great new book from the States (I'm afraid I can't remember off hand what it's called but should be easy enough to do without it). It contains all the words which children of 10-12 should all know. It gives the word followed by it's meaning and some suggestions about its usage. We put 2 words up on a board every two days and try to use them as much as possible during those two days. It can be lots of fun and certainly makes it easier to remember them. My son thought 'procrastinate' was very suited to him!

Good luck.
Terri

Vocab tip for VR

Post by Terri »

My daughter has a 'difficult word book' everytime she hears/sees a new word she writes it in the book and I often add in words from past papers or just words I think are useful, like all (well, with some exceptions !) the 4 letter words my husband and I could think of for the find the hidden word section (its amazing how many there are and how many a ten year old has never seen 'Veto' 'Scam' for example.I ask her to look them up in the dictionary and write the meaning out herself in the book and then at bedtime after stories we test each other by picking words from the book at random and asking for a sentence including the word.

My daughter covered the book in yellow paper as we kept losing it round the house as difficult words can appear at any time even in Strictly Come Dancing and they have to be scribbled down as neither of us can remember them later.
Hope this helps, it has owrked for us.
Bournemouth

Post by Bournemouth »

I'm glad that owrked for you!
We played a dictionary game where child reads out the meaning of a word from the dictionary (chosen by me, usually), gives the first letter and husband and son tried to guess the word. Was fun and gave dictionary practice/familiarity.
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