Increasing your child’s vocabulary should not be a difficult or boring task! There are plenty of fun and effective ways to introduce new words to your child, which will make learning and remembering them much easier.
Making Up Stories
Writing stories can be a great way for your child to practise using uncommon words and to improve spelling. You could also encourage them to narrate their day, describing things in detail to practise using a range of adjectives and adverbs.
When reading or listening, encourage them to switch out ‘boring’ words. For example, encourage more descriptive words instead of ‘walked’ and change ‘big’ to words like ‘towering’ or ‘colossal’. You could get your child to write a story, then switch out overused words for different or unfamiliar words of the same meaning using a thesaurus.
This exercise is an effective and fun way to introduce new words and improve descriptive writing skills. You could also make up stories orally together, taking it in turns to come up with the next sentence using a new word.
Play Word Games
Playing games like Boggle or Bananagrams together can help your child learn new words while also revising words they already know.
Encouraging your child to complete word searches and crosswords independently will also help them to increase their vocabulary by learning the meanings of new words they come across.
You could also play category games, where you are given a category like food or animals and have to think of as many words that fit within that category as you can. This helps increase your child’s noun vocabulary, particularly if you also play and share your answers with them.
Read Every Day
Encourage your child to read every day, preferably out loud. Reading every day, even if it’s only a small amount, has been shown countless times to be one of the best ways to learn new words. Books use a wider range of complex words than everyday speech, exposing your child to words they may not come across as frequently.
Contextual learning means that your child will be able to infer meanings of unfamiliar words from the words around them. If they find a word which they have not come across, encourage them to check its definition in a dictionary.
Reading and consciously learning new words is one of the best and easiest ways for your child to build up their vocabulary quickly. As well as helping to develop their vocabulary by introducing them to new words, reading daily helps with comprehension and communication skills, by extension.
Write Down Unfamiliar Words
If your child comes across an unfamiliar word in a book, or just in everyday conversation, encourage them to write down the word and its meaning in a notebook. This can make tricky words easier to grasp through repeated exposure to them. Encourage your child to use these unfamiliar words in sentences now and then, or use them in conversation more often yourself.
Your input into your child’s vocabulary learning is crucial and can really help them to learn new words and put them to use. Encouraging frequent reading, both independently and aloud, is the most effective and trusted way to build up a good vocabulary, but playing word games can also really help to enhance your child’s linguistic skills, as well as often being a lot of fun!
At our private school in Devon, we continue helping your child’s vocabulary through our lessons; vocabulary development is a core component of the English curriculum. Our school libraries are also fully stocked with an exciting range of books, ensuring all age groups can develop their vocabulary through a wide variety of reading.
