What I don’t see many educators talking about is the importance of vocabulary in reading. Maybe this is because it’s such a basic concept that it doesn’t need repetition. A child who grows up hearing a high level of vocabulary learns so many words just by hearing them….and that makes reading so much easier!

The goal of reading is comprehension. If a child is learning by the look-say method, then when he’s introduced to a word, he already has an idea what that word means. He doesn’t have to look it up in the dictionary. If he’s learning by phonics, he can say, “Oh, I recognize that word! So this is how it’s spelled.”

What’s sad is that so many children grow up in environments where they’re more likely to hear cursing and crude slang rather than good English. This puts the children at a disadvantage from the very start.

After glancing through the 4th reader, I’m almost convinced that 19th century English will be as incomprehensible as Old English in a few decades….except perhaps among the homeschoolers who grow up on these relics. It’s just amazing to me how quickly our language has changed…perhaps degenerated is a better word. Simplification is not necessarily a bad thing, but I wonder if our ability to express ourselves has diminished.

Certainly our vocabulary has.

I hv to wndr how lng it wl b bfr we all rt lk ths? Lts of kds alrdy do.