My Botched Early-Elementary Vocabulary Plan

I thought we had done great with vocabulary this year. Richie and Veronica did Vocabulary Cartoons and loved it. They learned a lot and use the words around the house. They also did Word Roots Beginning, which tested Latin parts of words.

We just did standardized testing and Veronica scored great, 95%, but Richie scored 65% having studied the same things. His test tested on words like ease and spoil. Not near the level he worked with all year.

So I'm redoing my vocabulary plan for the early years and making it mainly a reading comprehension plan. By having some reading comprehension skills in decoding word meaning through context, the biggest vocabulary gain is through reading. This year was Richie's 3rd grade year and that's when we start Reading Comprehension study. Now I'm rethinking that. It took half the year to just get through 1st-3rd simple comprehension before he could do the critical thinking-based 3rd/4th grade Reading Detective Beginning curriculum I had planned. It's decoding word meaning through context lesson was great, but he needed all the before stuff to understand it.

So my new plan is to get through the 1st-3rd basic stuff the summer before 3rd grade or even the last semester of 2nd. The problem with the latter is reading ability. It needs to be at a fluency level to even be able to tackle comprehension on those levels. We do all the sentence comprehension and following the story with the pictures of early readers, but I was surprised to find that those did nothing to prepare Richie for 3rd grade comprehension. That's what leads me to think a short intensive of simple reading for comprehension unit during summer would be the best plan.

So, where I'm going with this is here: we accomplished reading comprehension wonderfully this year and Richie scored 95% in that test; the only question missed being a vocabulary one. It was just too late to reap any vocabulary benefits with is new ability to understand the meaning of words through reading. We didn't follow up the reading comprehension with lots of grade level reading. For my kids who will naturally love to read by that age, this won't be an issue, but so far I haven't had one of those.