Roots Up

A nice little find...or maybe not really a find but a friend's find and then she shared it with me.....I bought this book for $8 after my friend told me about it...just another way to do some English and even sort of a foreign language all at the same time....The premise of this book is to know and understand the meaning of the English words and where they came from.  This book is designed to help children know the meaning of English words and what a rich legacy has been held for them throughout many generations...and then put it to use..The author believes that Latin and Classical Greek are vital to the beginning vocabulary development as phonics is to reading..The author believes that we need to teach vocabulary from the beginning as a system of component parts....roots and affixes...that have been handed down to us in a remarkable degree of preservation from the Latin and Greek of ancient times....all quoted from the book of course :)

Basically you begin the lesson by putting the root word on the board/paper and outlining it with the correct color...green for Greek or red for Latin.  For instance we learn what the Greek word Photo means one day....(light) and then the next day we learn what the Greek word graph means (to write or draw)...then she can put them together and know that photograph means a picture drawn by light...they also learn about 4 derivations as well as the definition of each word given each day...Derivatives:  telephoto, photometer, photophilia...and so on...Its all very interesting...and something Emily thinks is fun right now.  Emily makes her own index card with the Greek or Latin word, colors it, and puts the meaning on the back...and files it away in a card holder..