Hello Book Bums families!
Think your kids have outgrown picture books? This week Dr. Christy shares creative ways to keep learning from them. We also share a fun vocabulary quiz to test your word knowledge.
If you enjoyed our first podcast recommendation, we have another for you. What Should I Read Next is a fun book recommendation show where guests share three books they loved and one book they didn't then get ideas for their next read. There are many episodes that focus on middle school and YA books, so it's a great resource at gift-giving times.
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Word of the Week
fierce (feers) adjective/describing word - having powerful intensity or aggressiveness
The Olympian showed fierce determination when she completed her race despite injuring her foot.
"O, when she’s angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school;
And though she be but little, she is fierce."
- William Shakespeare from A Midsummer Night's Dream
Literary Calendar
• September 19th is the birthday of bookworm Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series.
• Hermione has faith in the library and herself. The knowledge she learned through reading saved the day many times during the series.
From our Bookshelves
Dear Zoo is a lift-the-flap board book, and it is the very book that taught me about the magic that happens when we read to very young children. You see, Dear Zoo was my oldest son’s very favorite book when he was a toddler. Chase loved lifting the flaps to reveal the animals inside each container. The repetitive text along with the space for kids to fill in each animal’s name as the flap is lifted creates the perfect, engaging reading experience.
The magic happened when Chase used the word fierce in a conversation. I remember thinking, “How in the world did my two-year-old just use that word?” And then I remembered the lion in Dear Zoo. “He was too fierce. I sent him back.” My little boy remembered the word fierce, used it in a way that revealed he understood the meaning, and he had learned it from a tiny board book.
It wasn’t long ago that Dear Zoo became my son’s son’s favorite book!
Tips for Families
Dear Zoo doesn’t have to be just for toddlers. I used this book with elementary-aged students, too! When teaching the five classes of vertebrates /vur-tuh-bruhts/, I had my students create their own Dear Zoo books to share with the kindergarten students in our building. Each student’s book had to include one example from each of the five classes of vertebrates (animals with backbones). There were lots of other teaching opportunities, too. I shared about ellipses, when to use a and an, the differences between to and too, what adjectives are, and more.
To make the books, we stapled six pieces of construction paper together. The kids wrote the text on the pages (in pencil, and then we went over it with a black marker after it was edited), added flaps made of pieces of colorful construction paper, and then they drew animals under those flaps. After they added details to make the books even more appealing, they read them with their buddies.
You could do this at home. What a great gift these books could be!
Tips for Readers and Writers
Although kids love repetitive, predictable books as toddlers, we don’t recommend using these books for the purpose of having kids remember “sight words.” All words become sight words, but they should not be taught as pictures that kids should recognize and recall.
Just because my son “read” the words, He was too . . . hundreds of times, Chase would not have been able to read any of them out of the context of the story. That’s not how most kids learn to read. BUT he learned to love reading, and that was enough to create a desire to read. That sure helps kids to persist as they learn to crack the code.
Wordology Workshop
• The Latin root vert means turn.
• You can find it in the word, vertebrate, where it refers to joints of the spine, like a hinge in a body.
• How many other vers/vert words can your family think of?
Practical Grammar
I’m guilty of it and you probably are, too. We often see words in books, and we take a stab at using them in a conversation, only to realize that we’ve said it incorrectly when we get “that look” from a friend, family member, or colleague. It’s embarrassing.
Back in June, in our Tips for Teaching Readers section, I included this line:
Never make fun of someone for mispronouncing a word. It means they learned it while reading.
Not everyone has seen this quote. Or maybe they’re simply not heeding the advice. Regardless, we’re including, below, 20 commonly Mispronounced Words. For fun, quiz yourself to see if you’ve been mispronouncing some of these, or try it with a friend!
Commonly Mispronounced Words
1. cache /cash/
2. sherbet (sherbet, not sherbert)
3. kibosh /k-eye-bosh/
4. banal /buhnal/
5. prestigious (first i has a short I sound/not a long e sound)
6. biopic /bio-pic/
7. chaos /kay-os/
8. segue /seg-way/
9. primer /primmer/
10. moot /moot/ (not mute)
11. GIF /jif/
12. mischievous /MIS-chuh-vus/
13. niche /neesh/ or /nitch/
14. forte /fort/ (unless re: music)
15. quasi /kway-z-eye/
16. gyro /yee-roh/
17. sans (meaning) /san/
18. genre /zh-on-ruh/ (zh sounds like the third sound in vision)
19. antennae /an-ten-ee/
20. prestigious /press-tih-jus/
My husband and I used to love to take quizzes and compete against one another. We especially loved “Word Power“ in the Reader’s Digest.
We’ve included a Word Power sample for you to try.
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