My son has always loved learning new vocabulary. It was never enough just to be able to read a word. He always wanted to know the exact meaning of words that he hadn't heard before and their etymology. He loved for me to read books to him with a high level of vocabulary when he was preschool age. He particularly enjoyed National Geographic Magazine and would read the captions underneath the pictures and ask about any words he didn't know. As a preschooler he really liked Aesop's Fables and I think the vocabulary was one of the things he liked about it. At six it was Shakespeare. Once or twice when he was about four I was doing the reading in an article about dinosaurs, but he watched as I read and he corrected my pronunciation of dinosaur names. He had a Magic School Bus computer game about dinosaurs so he knew their names better than I did. He also liked to read the dictionary as a preschooler and surprise his dad by using interesting words. Once when he was about four, his dad said something to him and my son told him it was a double entendre because it had a double meaning. He loved words with more than one meaning because he loved making puns and jokes, only kids his age didn't get them. He found word games on the computer and he just had a lot of fun with words. He didn't find out until he turned five and started kindergarten that he couldn't actually use the wonderful vocabulary he had learned because people where we live thought there had to be something wrong with a little kid who talked more like an adult and used vocabulary that they didn't know. Five year olds were supposed to enjoy coloring in the lines and my son didn't. The Kindergarten teacher actually wanted to hold him back a year because he wouldn't color in the lines and she thought he didn't really need to learn anything the next year because he was so far ahead in everything else. The kindergarten teacher even acted like I did something wrong by letting him learn to read and learn words that he wasn't supposed to know and said kids would think he was different. It was obvious she thought different was bad. I didn't know at that time about the bullying problem so she might have thought he would be a target for bullies if he didn't learn to act like the average kid.
But I told my son that I didn't want him to dumb down just to please other people. I told him I always admired people who were very articulate because I am not, no matter how many books I read or how many vocabulary games I played. I told him it was the thing that I thought was most attractive about his dad when I first met him. His dad is very articulate and his dad's mother came from a family of lawyers and judges. I told him he would just have to ignore those people who think all kids of a certain age have to be the same. It is good to be different. I am happy that he is different. His differences are what make him so much fun.
