Use Big Words

Posted by Christine | 0 comments

My then 8-year-old bounds down the stairs to find my mom and me as we are discussing nothing in particular.

“That pot on the stove, it’s chittering; I think it’s ready.” And off he runs, ready to conquer whatever is on his lego-conscious mind.

“Chittering?” my mom says. “Is that even a word?”

“Yup, something he must have read somewhere,” I answer with a smile.

I want to raise children with good verbal skills. I love when my toddlers use words like “actually” or “suddenly”, and string together colloquialisms that sound like they should be coming from an adult. In my experience, there are specific ways to encourage this kind of vocabulary in children and it begins very early. Though my mom didn’t know what ‘chitter’ meant, she was really the one with the natural ability to encourage conversation with babies and older children. What I learned from her, I use in our daily life and learning, making it my own as I go.

• No baby talk. This doesn’t mean that we should never speak in a cutesy tone to our infants, but as a rule, conversations with babies should be full of fun and colorful words and descriptions about the world they are absorbing. A child who understands more at an earlier age, will eventually speak in the same way he’s been spoken to.

• Answer their “whys” with big words. Just when we want to pull our hair out from all of the questions that toddlers and preschoolers ask is when we need to instead take a deep breath and give a truthful and detailed explanation. Whether it’s “Why does the sun always shine on my side of the car in the morning?” or “Why do I slide better in my socks than my bare feet?”, we shouldn’t be afraid to use big words that they are not familiar with. Of course, hearing the question “What does that mean?”, is an inevitability we should then be prepared for.

• Choose good literature for read-alouds. We as homeschoolers are always on the lookout for the best books for our children, and there are better book lists by homeschooling companies than there are by anyone else. Some books are just light years beyond others in quality, especially considering the pop-culture atmosphere of mediocrity today. Books with not only good vocabulary, but also long sentences and intricate sentence structure should be at the top of our list. Children can grasp so much when read to by an adult who adds flair and meaning to the words on a page.

• Be a walking thesaurus. If my son were to say of his sister, “Maddy’s being really annoying asking me to play with her over and over,” I could respond by saying, “She’s quite persistent that way. Why don’t you oblige her just this once?” He might not know the definitions of “oblige” or “persistent” but he can infer those meanings by their context and be better able to define them if they come up again.

• Play word games. Scrabble, Bananagrams, Scattergories, and many more, are fun ways of introducing new words into children’s vocabularies.An atmosphere of intellectual respect goes a long way toward helping children fulfill high expectations. Verbally, our children are capable of absorbing language and making it their own, naturally and without compulsion, if we love language ourselves.

Christine is a Christian, homeschooling mom to three boys and a girl, ranging in age from 9 to 2 years old. She is a musician by trade, eclectic in homeschool style, and continues to grow and learn along with her children in this journey of life and discipleship at home. Visit her blog at Fruit in Season.