The fifth grade school year is a very important year where language arts and vocabulary are concerned. Standards based bench marks indicate that students should be able to use grade appropriate vocabulary. From a parental and teacher point of view that statement doesn’t really help us decided what is the appropriate vocabulary. Aside from giving you a specific list of what words are considered grade appropriate for a fifth grader, it might be more helpful to let you know what kinds of words are the ones you need to concentrate on helping your child master fifth grade vocabulary. On the list of language arts skills that are necessary for your child to know at this age are the use of synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. I’ve noticed that my fifth grader was having a great deal of difficulty with synonyms and antonyms until we learned a memory jog. Synonym starts with an “S” as does the word “same”. So synonyms are words that mean the same thing. Similarly, antonyms are words that have opposite meanings, and so “A” stands for anti- or against. Once we figured this out, my daughter caught on to these very quickly.

Prefixes and suffixes are also important parts of your fifth graders language arts study. Once I figured out that my child worked well with mnemonics to keep the meanings of words straights I started looking for other mnemonics. Your fifth grader definitely knows that PRE-school comes before regular school just like PRE-fixes come before regular words and Seniors are finishing up school, like Suffixes are finishing up words. Of course, the mnemonics that we use may not be the ones that work for your child, but they are a useful device, particularly if your child is having difficulty remembering all the vocabulary devices they must remember to be on grade level.

Words with Greek and Latin roots make up many of the words that are age appropriate for fifth graders to learn. Learning roots, particularly words with Latin roots, will come in handy for your child when they begin to learn foreign languages that are based on Latin, such as the Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. The other place these words will help your child is as they continue their studies in sciences. Don’t expect them to get the roots immediately. Learning a few roots at a time, particularly if you can come up with catchy or memorable ways to remember the meaning of the roots will help your fifth grader build a wide and varied vocabulary.

Last but by no means least, is using vocabulary word games to help your child practice and cement the information your are

helping them gather about the meanings of words, and the uses of the various linguistic concepts such as homophones and idioms, prefixes and suffixes, synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. If you have read any of my previous posts, you will know by now that I love education that is fun and vocabulary games are certainly more fun than writing words over and over, or simply using the words in sentences. I’m not saying that writing words, repeating words, and creating sentences is a bad thing, I just think if we have to learn something, we should find a way to make it fun!

I’m convinced that learning contractions is just plain difficult for a lot of kids.  My oldest child is in 6th grade and still makes errors with contractions in her writing.  Thinking back a few decades, I don’t think contractions were a cakewalk for me, either!

What works best?  Should contractions be gradually incorporated into reading lessons, or is that just adding unnecessary confusion for beginning readers?   Or does this work kind of like learning a foreign langauge, where they say the earlier you teach it to a child the more ingrained and automatic the knowledge will become in practice?  Should kids memorize lists of contractions, like words on a spelling test?

I’m sure if I asked her, my 6th grader would choose to skip the whole topic completely, but for us moms trying to raise literate children, this is a quandary.  I tend to think that incremental exposure to contractions, using a method of teach-and-review, with repetition, is the best choice.

I’m going to throw in a bit of review every now and then and break up the monotony of my daughter’s usual language lessons with some contraction games, and see how that works.  Hopefully, learning contractions will become a continuous process and she won’t freeze up or find them overwhelming if she has frequent reinforcement of them.

I realized when I started homeschooling years ago that I too will be learning and relearning.  Just when I thought my brain was getting stale it gets refreshed.  Daily that is now with homeschooling my girls. 

My mother was not a so good speller and I seem to somewhat take after her.  But I did not want my girls to be horrible spellers.  Learning word roots is very useful for developing critical thinking skills for vocabulary.  Giving my daughters the latin root vocabulary skills  is the best thing I could have done for them and it is an ongoing learning process.  Learning these word elements can improve spelling and the ability to decode unfamiliar words. Vocabulary can be fun,  just find somelatin matching games to enhance the learning.  I also found some word games at the book store.  Sometimes at the dinner table we just play some word games too.  The relaxed environment of eating and just talking seems to make it fun for my girls!

Do you supplement your child’s basic education with subjects that are considered enhancements? As my child reaches upper elementary school it becomes more and more obvious that she needs “electives” to add to her basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. These electives are things that enrich and enhance her education. Foreign language is one thing we have added to her regular school subjects. In an effort to make her education more well rounded, we have also added music lessons and art lessons.Music, as enhancement, comes in several forms. We have started piano lessons, and this is her core music education. She is also active in choir and participates in a hand bell choir. Neither of those are intense music, they are more like music exposure. Another way we have music exposure is to listen to classical music, and to practice music theory through online music games. By now you have probably figured out that we love to learn through games.

Art is another thing we have added. She does go to an art class once a week. There is a live teacher and other students in the class. Techniques are taught, and practiced. It is good to have the instructor, who is an accomplished artist and teacher in the gifted and talented program in the local school system. The unfortunate thing about this is that it is only once a week. When my daughter is needing an art fix sometime during the week, between lessons, we utilize an animated art program. This program is online, and teaches art appreciation and techniques. It is available any time she wants to access this program.

“Oh Mom!  I don’t want to do another vocabularly lesson!  When am I EVER going to need this stuff in real life?!”

I’d be willing to bet just about all homeschooling moms have heard some variation on this theme.  Kids don’t like vocabularly lessons, with all those funky words they’ve never heard of, and having to make sense of it all.   But what is the importance of vocabularly lessons?

The first answer that comes to mind when my kids ask when they’ll ever need all this fancy-schmancy vocabulary is, for me anyway, when they take the SAT in high school.  High SAT scores make a huge difference when applying to college, and great vocabularly skills make all the difference on this test.

However, if you moms out there put your mind to it, you could certainly come up with a creative way to word a more generic explanation…something about people with better vocabularly seeming more intelligent, getting higher paying jobs, or having longer life expectancies. (OK, so maybe not the longer life expectancy, but it’s worth a shot and it’ll tell you how closely your kids are listening!   LOL)

The best way to learn new vocabulary isto practice actually using it in everyday speech, so it becomes automatic.  But if you need some reinforcement for fun, try vocabularly games to perk up the school day!   Your kids will surprise you someday by using an impressive SAT word you’ve never heard of, and you’ll be left wondering where they learned it!