Going on a Fall Word Hunt: Building Vocabulary

Caleb and I had fun this week walking around the RV park taking pictures of all things fall and capturing a few of those Have-to-Fall-Memory-Snapshots. There is so much going on as summer blends into autumn with festivals and hay rides not to mention the beautiful changes in the landscape that God paints around us. While these moments make great photo opportunities for us, our children can also profit from the vocabulary that transpires during these experiences. You can also continue to develop your child’s vocabulary just by revisiting those pictures and talking about the day, the things they did, how they felt, and more!

There are many studies that tell us the importance of building vocabulary at an early age. The Investigating the Relationship Between Vocabulary Knowledge and Academic Reading Performance: An Assessment Perspective study was completed by David D. Qian and published in 2002. In it he shares, “The study found that the dimension of vocabulary depth is as important as that of vocabulary size in predicting performance on academic reading”

Ideas for Building and Deepening your Child’s Vocabulary

(Please note: In this list, I will refer to the child as he, him, or his as appropriate.)

1. Go on a nature walk and talk about the things that you see, hear, smell, feel. Use synonyms to describe objects. For example, when describing a leaf you might say, “Look how the leaf bends. It’s very flexible.”

 

2. Focus on Nouns - When taking those cute close up pictures at the pumpkin farm, back up and get more in your background. Print these pictures out as big as you can and post it on white butcher paper. Have your child name all the things he sees in the picture as you label them. With older children, you can help them sound out the words on index cards and place them around the picture.

 

 

3. Focus on Adjectives – This works best with those close up pictures. Print these pictures out as you did with the noun practice. Then, have your child describe the object using as many adjectives as he can think of as you or your child labels the picture.
 

 

4. Focus on Verbs – We often forget this one, but it is important for children to have a strong verb vocabulary as this is what will make their writing POP later. For example, the sentence, “The farmer sat on the tractor” can be spiced up with the right verb, “The farmer bumpity-bumped on the tractor.” This activity works best with pictures that capture action shots. Your toddler may be climbing over pumpkins or rolling down a hill. Post an enlarged version of the picture as before and have your child describe the actions the objects in the picture are doing. As your child gets better at this, challenge him to describe the action of even the smallest item in the picture. You might ask, “What are the leaves on the trees doing?” Remember they can even describe things that are still as standing, sitting, posing, smiling, etc.

 

 

5. Create a Slide Show of your pictures to practice singular and plural words (leaf, leaves, tree, trees, pumpkin, pumpkins…)

 

Happy Fall Hunting everyone!

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