5th-Grade Vocabulary Enrichment 2010-2011COURSE DESCRIPTION & SYLLABUS

(may be revised as we go)

This course has three main goals:1) to improve students’ ability to dissect and understand unfamiliar English words2) to show them how the English language has changed over time3) to teach them a little bit about Greek and Roman culture.

Class meets once a week. I assign two lessons per week from the workbook (Red Hot Root Words, book 2) as homework that night. The first page of each lesson introduces a few prefixes, main stems or suffixes that come from Latin or Greek, followed by 10 words that use those elements. The second page has exercises (matching, fill-in-the-blank, etc.) using the ten words.

There's a quiz at the beginning of each class on the 20 words in the two workbook lessons assigned the week before. Most of the year, the quiz asks students to give the correct spelling, the definition and the part of speech for four of the words. A few times, they will instead be required to compose correct, creative sentences using the week's words.

Caveat: every week, I give the students a schedule that instructs them to study a few of the 20 words each night. Mrs. Kufahl reserves the right to give a pop quiz in Language Arts class any day of the week on the previous night’s words. The purpose of this arrangement is to ensure that students don’t wait till the night before vocab class to study for the weekly quiz.

After the quiz, rather than spend the whole class period going over homework, we do all sorts of activities relating to Greek- and Latin-derived English words. See the syllabus below for brief descriptions of them.

Half of the vocab grade each quarter comes from the quarter exam, and half from the average of the weekly quiz grades (minus the lowest one, which I always drop).

Sessions 1 Intro to course:

1) basis for course grade (weekly quizzes, pop quizzes, quarterexam)2) how we’ll be using the textbook (Red Hot Root Words book 2) andstem lists (Greek and Latin Elements in the English Language)3) some of the skills we’ll be developing, e.g. breaking long and/ordifficult words into prefix-main stem-suffix and learning the figurativeas well as the literal meanings of words.

2 Intro to the Indo-European family of languages. Students create a language‘family tree’ for the classroom showing the relationship of Greek andLatin to English, as well as all the languages they speak.

3 Brief history of the English language.4

5 Group activity: break down a word, compare the meanings of its parts with6 its dictionary definition; present the divided word to rest of class and 7 help them guess its meaning based on the meanings of its parts.

8 exam prep9 first quarter exam

10 Learn the Greek alphabet; transliterate both common and proper nouns out11 of Greek into English

12 Group activity: using GLE, create words with given prefixes and main stems -13 multiple parts of speech for each combination (RHRW pg. 26)14

15 Practice for new quiz format: instead of memorizing the spelling, definition andpart of speech of words in RHRW, students will practice composingsentences that use the words both correctly and creatively.

16 exam prep17 second quarter exam

18 Context exercise: students will read Calvin & Hobbes cartoons selected for their 19 vocabulary and practice figuring out the meaning of unfamiliar words via20 both their knowledge of stems and the words’ context.

21 Word-Root Jeopardy: students will compete to think of a word given its main 22 stem and definition, or the name of a famous figure from Greek23 mythology, thereby earning extra points on quizzes.

24 exam prep25 third quarter exam

26 Mythology Match Game: Students will learn (or review) the meanings of words27 derived from famous and not-so-famous figures in Greek and Roman myth.

28 Synonym ‘Go Fish’: To learn about the flexibility of the English language (drawing as it29 does on both Germanic and Latin/Greek roots), students will play a card game

based on groups of synonyms.

30 More Word-Root Jeopardy31

32 exam prep33 fourth quarter exam