Expanding your vocabulary is a great goal in itself, but it tends to take up more importance as students prepare to face such tests at End of Grade (EOG) exams and SAT/ACT, etc. But here is a resource that can make your vocabulary-building more fun.
The website, Mysteries of Venacular, is developing a series of fun videos on the twists and turns that English words have taken from their Greek, Latin, Old English, or other roots to their modern meanings and spellings. Mysteries of Venacular tend to focus on simple words, like clue or hearse, but which came from unique or memorable origins (Greek mythology for the former and a word for "wolf" for the latter). Once you've seen one of these videos, you'll never forget where the word came from.
For example, watch this video on the derivation of the word "noise":
Plus, some of the words have some additional content on the TED-Ed Lesson Plan site. The lesson plan for the word "noise" has some additional questions to make you think about the etymology, a place to discuss your thoughts about this word with other people, and other resources, such as the top five sounds scientists have discovered are the worst for the human ear. And just imagine--nails on a blackboard is only #5! To listen to the sound of the single worst assault on human hearing, check out the lesson plan.
Right now, there are only a few words, but new videos are being added periodically. So while it isn't a mainstay for vocabulary building, it is an intriguing resource for families like ours who are continually amazed at some of the way that English came to be as it is today.
When it as hot as it has been in the Southeast lately, reading is a great activity. If you want to add some educational lessons to your middle schooler's summer reading, the Boston public television station, WGBH, has some useful online lessons to teach literacy schools. Entitled Inspiring Middle School Literacy, and funded by Walmart, these self-paced digital lessons combine video, interactive exercises, and writing to hone such skills as constructing summaries, distinguishing fact from opinion, categorization, comparing and contrasting items, etc. They are designed for students in grades 5-8, and are also arranged by content areas: English Language Arts, Science and Health Topics, and Social Studies Topics.
One of our favorite activities around the Christmas break is reading, either new books that we got as presents or the multitude of books we've been meaning to get around to but haven't had time. So we often spend time this week between Christmas and New Years lounging about, reading good books as we much on our Christmas leftovers or goodies from stockings or other presents.
This year, we are doing that as we all read the same author, if not the same book. This Christmas, we all received different books by Bill Bryson, the delightful essayist whose most famous book is A Walk in the Woods, but who has produced about fifteen other books as well on subjects ranging from travel to explaining the universe.
My husband received Bryson's latest book, which is called At Home: A Short History of Private Life, in which Bryson investigates a variety of items commonly found in a home to discover where they came from and why they developed as they did. You can get a sense of the book from this video:
My son got a older book, but another of the most famous ones of Bryson's collection: The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. As the title implies, this is Bryson's attempt to explain the many peculiarities of the English language by tracing its development over time. I read it and really enjoyed it, although it is hardly a definite exposition of all the quirks of our native language. But my son is always asking me about why things are spelled in strange ways, and why we say this instead of that, so I think this is a great book for him. He has been laughing aloud as he reads it, so I think he is finding it amusing as well as educational.
My gift was a follow-on to my son's book. It is Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States. It extends Bryson's Mother Tongue analysis to the ways the language grew in the United States over time. I've only begun it, but have found it interesting so far, although the first few chapters seem to be as devoted to dismissing myths about early American History as it is about the language of our Founding Fathers and Mothers. However, The Independent, an English newspaper, had what I thought was an excellent review of the book from the British perspective, which you can read here.
It is a cold, grey, and rainy day here in North Carolina--a perfect day for staying home and curling up with a good book. And we've got three good ones from Bryson. The exciting thing is that we can switch amongst each other when we get tired or done with the one we're reading now.
Merry Christmas to all! I hope everyone is getting to spend the day with friends and family with love and peace all around.
And for a little joy--watch this Christmas message from Teddy Bear, the "talking" porcupine from Zooniversity:
Teddy is, as far as I know, the first porcupine whose videos have gone viral on the Internet. He is most famous for his unwillingness to share his corn in a video released last month that has been viewed by over a million Internet users and aired on numerous national TV shows, such as The Today Show and Good Morning America.
The clip is popular because people watching it insist that Teddy protests the removal of his corn with such human phrases as "It's my corn," "Mine," "Stop," or "Get back." The funny thing is that people hearing the words speak all sorts of different languages! The majority speak English, but Zooniversity has also gotten claims of hearing such phrases in German, Dutch, and Russian.
It's a great example of how we hear what we are expecting and see what we are looking for.
Here is the original Teddy video so you can judge for yourself:
I join Teddy in wishing everyone a Merry Christmas!
PS--In the first video, what looks like a gingerbread man is actually a low-sugar dog biscuit decorated for a holiday treat. So no animal health was endangered so that we could enjoy this cute video. Also, Teddy apparently liked the Santa hat, because he kept it on for about an hour even after the video was shot. Teddy has been hand raised from a baby and is one of the animal ambassadors for Zooniversity that goes to visit schools and conduct educational programs. He seems to be one social porcupine!
We went swimming today, which usually results in us returning in a tired but relaxed, feeling-good state. Today, however, I came home with a headache. Why? Because the pool where we were swimming was playing rock music at such a loud level that it distracted my son from concentrating on his swimming and left me with a headache.
Why was it so loud? When we were there, there were only a handful of swimmers. So I'm thinking that perhaps it had been set at a louder level for the weekend, where presumably they had a lot of families swimming, which required them to play the music at a higher volume, and they forgot to reduce it for their smaller and quieter Monday clientele. I would have asked at the desk, but nobody was there when we were ready to leave, and I wasn't sticking around any longer to try to get an answer.
But it reminded me of the talk we heard yesterday from Richard Maraj, who was speaking about how to make the most of the time we have. One of the things Richard talked about a lot was listening--listening to others, listening to ourselves, listening to our spiritual guidance. So it struck my attention--I attended a talk about listening, and then a case where listening (or, at least, hearing) resulted in physical distress. That was enough to make me check out some resources about listening.
Eventually, that led me to one of the current experts on listening--a man named Julian Treasure. He gave a talk to TED a couple of years ago about the way that sounds affect us:
This talk helped explain why I got a head ache, why I wanted to show that video on the Internet several days ago, and why the pool had better reconsider the volume of their music if they hope to turn a profit. One of his best points, I think, is how powerful music can be, whether for good or for ill (he played one second clips that were instantly recognizable and that could effect our moods very powerfully).
Even more helpful, though, was his TED talk of last month, in which he gave tips about how to listen more effectively. His argument here was that all the noise in our environment is degrading our ability to listen, which effectively degrades our ability to live (see my original point about Richard's talk). But he gives us some tips to improve listening skills:
These are good ideas not only for us to know, but for our middle schoolers. Because, let's face it--even as we attempt to differentiate education, and include multimedia and adjust for multiple intelligences and different learning styles, a lot of education is about listening. I think we may not realize that our children may need more coaching about how to listen that we did, since we grew up in a less auditorially-complex world.
It may be that some coaching on improving listening abilities may be the best back-to-school tool we can provide our children with for the upcoming school year.
While I've mentioned previously that my son is taking a Calder camp this week at the gorgeous new Cary Arts Center, I also have to report on the fabulous Art and Poetry Camp he did last with his weekly art teacher during the school year, Miss Jenny of Egg in Nest Art Studio. Like everything he does with Miss Jenny, the camp was multimedia, multidisciplinary, creatively inspirational, individualized, a little offbeat, and really high quality instruction:
They started with bookmaking, taught by one of Miss Jenny's former students who has studied bookmaking at Penland School of Arts. They ended up making a 60-page coptic stitch book out of luscious paper that they decorated themselves with black ink:
Then they studied poetry, and wrote and illustrated their own poems, which they included or inserted among the pages. This sample of Madison's poems really captures Ogden Nash's poetic style, I think:
MANATEE
I'm partial to the Manatee
Of which it has no enemy
Full of lovely proximity
Or sometimes they would just do art:
Or found word poetry:
Or just react to the patterns created by the ink decoration:
I can't do justice to this piece with my photographs, because it is so lovely to hold and to page through, discovering one little quirky gem after another. But he had a great experience and ended up with a really wonderful art book, and I am very grateful to Miss Jenny for running the camp even though it has a small enrollment.
Madison showed his appreciation to his teacher by immortalizing her through his inimitable portrait style:
We seem to be doing even more educational activities than I had planned for the summer. However, they tend to be the more fun and laid-back investigations of various topics. One resource that we've stumbled onto recently and have really enjoyed is The History of English in Ten Minutes.
This is a serious of one-minute cartoons on the different ethnic or writing contributions to the English language. The cartoons are quick and funny, although they don't have a lot of depth. But they help to depict the wide variety of places that English expressions came from, which helps to explain why spelling can be SO CRAZY!
Don't take my word for it--watch it yourself. All ten short videos are embedded below. My son enjoyed them so much that he watched all of them without my even having to ask him to do so.
If you have a middle schooler who loves words in your household, like we do...or would maybe like to encourage one into developing...check out the online language arts resource, Etymologic. It bills itself as "The Toughest Word Game on the Web," which isn't too much of an exaggeration (although I would dispute the term game--it is just an online quiz). The page brings up a word or a phrase that is appropriate for a middle school vocabulary, along with four proposed explanations of where the term came from. All four options are reasonable, and none of them are obvious. However, you can sometimes dwindle the choices just through some knowledge of the language from which it is derived.
It's not easy. I'm fairly good on etymology, and I haven't done better than 7 out of 10 correct answers yet. But it is a great thing to do with your middle schooler and to talk through the word and the possible origins. And referring to my post earlier this week about Subtle Ways to Prepare Middle Schoolers for college, this is an interesting way to help them prepare for tests like the SAT or ACT, not only by improving their vocabulary, but also by practicing the skill of eliminating choices to improve your odds of getting the right answer, even if you end up guessing.
For real word nerds (student or parents or other interested relatives), there is also a neat function where you can submit your own question and proposed answer set for the question bank. We aren't there yet, but when we have a bit broader experience of ancient languages, I think my son will get a real kick out of making up his own questions and having them appear in the quiz. And, of course, having lots of people contribute words helps keep the answer bank big and interesting.
Over 100 million people have visited the site, so it must be doing something right! And let me know if you submit a word, and we'll keep an eye out for it.
