Hi, I'm new here. My 7year old 2nd grader was identified as HG recently, and as a result has started GATE. In our district, GATE normally starts in 3rd, so he is the only 2nd grader in the group. He came home excited, said they will discuss ancient Egypt first. He indicated that there is GATE homework. My older daughter went through this program, and they never had homework. Apparently things have changed in the 5 years separating my kids...maybe something to do with Common Core. I look at the homework, and it is vocabulary. "Abstruse" is one of the words. This seems pretty difficult, even for gifted 3rd graders. I am afraid that my son will be discouraged, not want to go to to GATE, and miss out on the interesting Egypt stuff because of this. I'm really surprised, I thought I knew what we were getting with GATE. Does anyone have input on this? Thanks.

Though the vocabulary words may be hard, don't be discouraged. It may only be some words that will be necessary for the particular unit study. As long as there are 10-15 words per week, or less, it should be ok. You can ask the GATE teacher about future lists before making any decision. Good luck!

Thanks mycup. My son doesn't like to write at all, so a sentence including "abstruse" is not really his thing at all. I hope this is just a fluke. I wasn't entirely sure what it meant myself and I am an avid reader.

Could be worse, he could've brought home third grade GATE math homework marked "challenge" that was a page of small number addition and subtraction problems. Setting aside the writing part, did he understand the word, find it interesting? Unusual words can really fire the imagination, I'll own up to looking it up, myself, and was amused that at least it was self-defining (abstruse is abstruse.)

Yes, Zen, I think that is how he will remember that one. We thought that was funny as well.

I think that's kind of great!

I think it is great, too, as long as it is handled well. How many words a week do they have to learn?
In contrast, my DD13's words for English Honors included "chandelier."

My DD's 4th grade teacher is making a big deal out of vocab this year and I'm really pleased...I feel this is something that sometimes gets forgotten in the early grades, and it's a great way for younger gifties to enjoy words. Kids who read way above level can use a little instruction with this, or at least mine can--her vocab seems a bit lacking, considering the books she reads. (Yesterday I had to tell her what "dominate" means, which I thought she ought to know.) I'm not sure she's really trying that hard to get meanings from context.

Can he send some of that vocab to my son? lol. His spelling/vocab words still seem super easy this year... I am hoping they get harder once the teacher settles in and does the first assessment.

(Can't wait for MAP testing!!)

They have 10 words a week. I think that abstruse is not a word for most elementary age kids. I'm wondering what the teacher is thinking on that. Another is "abut", which my silly 7 year old thinks is hilarious. That one is right up his alley. He also had "affidavit", he doesn't have the background knowledge to really understand that one. My 7th grader learned some new words, so that is a plus.

Interesting, that list got me curious and type in those threee words. And the first thing I find is those words for this week on a site called: vocabulary.com. I suspect someone phoned it in.

https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/293705#view=notes

Here's the whole list from there:
abhor
abominate
abridge
abstruse
abut
abyss
accolade
adjunct
affidavit
affinity

Definitely seems like like an adult vocab builder.

Oh, lordy. That hurts on so many levels.

It's a bit silly to give words like abstruse and affidavit to a 7-year-old. Children that age won't use those words and will just forget them ("Joey, I can't go to recess today. I have to write an affidavit and the procedure I have to follow is abstruse.").

Plus, I'm an ornery type about things like this. It seems to me that unless the teacher quoted the source of these words, she was stealing or plagiarizing the vocabulary list. Here are vocabulary.com's terms of use, which are accessible via a link in the bottom right corner of every page on the site:


I would be inclined to bring this up with the principal if this list really did come from vocabulary.com. It may seem small, but I've dealt with two faculty members who do this sort of thing (as a supervisor), and what you catch in a situation like this can be the tip of the iceberg. It's not a good sign if someone can't even be bothered to make a simple attribution.

(But if this list didn't come from a website somewhere, ignore me.)

ETA: I found the list all over the web. It seems to be a list of SAT words that came originally from vocabularycartoons.com. At least, they seem to have put the most work into the words. Someone named Mr. Thompson appears to have also used it without attribution. This was precisely what our (eventually fired) faculty members were doing: using something and stripping it of information about who made it.

My son's school for HG kids uses sometimes difficult words. I know they pull from all kinds of lists, including lists of words commonly misspelled by adults. I think it's great. Many HG kids will not have learned how to memorize spelling words, since they are familiar with so very many words. I think this is another method of teaching them to learn how to learn.

The teacher may just be getting a feel for the kids, too, and may have different plans for spelling later on. I think half the year in my son's second grade, the kids were able to pick their own words.

ETA: If you find your son is still struggling after a few weeks, it can't hurt to talk with the teacher.

ETA2: I see I'm in the minority here. I guess for my son, the challenge was welcome. He did and does use rather abstruse words in his daily vocabulary... He was reading at a really high level even in 2nd, and the lists he had gotten in his local school before he transferred to the HG program were a waste of time for him.

SNORK!! Love that.


StPaulie, I agree with you. My DD got some very odd vocabulary words from ME at this age... I kept the records since she had to look up dictionary definitions and parts of speech for them in a composition book. A partial list of one week's words for my then 5yo:


Rumen
Upheaval
Pillage
Arthropod

She enjoyed this activity, fwiw, and it was a LOT better than what passed for "enrichment" in the third grade curriculum with Connections (which was using Calvert at the time) the following year.

I'm pretty sure I knew all three of those words in elementary school, although probably not in 2nd grade. My kindergartener would be beside himself with glee at "abut" - I'll have to teach him that one.

Really, doesn't it depend on the child? I suspect that in a HG classroom you'll find a wide range of reading and vocabulary levels, especially in 2nd grade. My ds13 could absolutely have understood these words when he was 7, and he used words like that in his vocabulary when speaking. He was also reading high school and college level books and comprehending what he read. My HG+ dd9, otoh, struggles with vocabulary (she has a reading LD)... yet that doesn't mean she doesn't also have needs that can and probably should be met in a gifted classroom.

I think we often hear the phrase here: "If you've seen one gifted child, you've seen one gifted child." In any given gifted classroom, chances are you'll see a wide swath of abilities.

My take on it is - we seek out gifted classrooms for our children for several reasons:

1) A chance to learn at their ability level and not have to be bored and held back by learning at a slower-than-their-brain-works pace

2) Intellectual stimulation - giving them the chance to really *use* their brains

3) Challenge - so that they don't coast through school never encountering challenge

4) A chance to be with intellectual peers

I can't imagine it's possible to come up with a homogeneous classroom of HG students where everyone is at the same level of ability across the board - chances are some of the students are going to be way ahead in vocabulary and some students are going to be way ahead in math and some might be semi-ahead across the board (compared to other gifted students) etc.

I would give the teacher a chance and see what unfolds with the vocabulary. If it proves to be too much of a challenge for your ds, talk to the teacher and work out of game plan. Just as you would watch and observe and then advocate if you felt your ds wasn't being challenged in the classroom.

Best wishes,

polarbear

ps - re your older dd not having homework in the gifted program and your ds bringing home homework - that might mean the program has changed, but I suspect it might also simply be due to having a different teacher.

Sort of. In my experience, 7-year-olds (even gifted ones) don't talk about affidavits. They're legally too young to give them and besides, as was pointed out, they lack the context to understand what an affidavit even is.

In a wider context, my kids are all superior in their verbal abilities, but they don't get their big vocabularies from word lists. They get them in context-specific ways, like an interest in paleontology or through reading a lot of books or from hearing us talk. Context is a constant, and so is the fact that words are encountered repeatedly, in a meaningful way.

As Zen Scanner pointed out, the words that started this thread appear to have been grabbed from an online source and thought doesn't appear to have gone into picking them.

Honestly, I don't see much point in handing out long lists of random vocabulary words to kids. When the words in a list are taken from a book that the kids are reading, that's great. There's a context and the kids are likely to encounter the words more than once in the book (e.g. blunderbuss in a historical novel). But when words get pulled out of the ether and tossed out for memorizing, I don't see the point. It's like a cheap, industrial method that cranks out words but little else. Everyone feels good because lots of big words have been assigned and tests have been administered. But no one thinks about what happens to last week's list next week when we stop using affidavit and abstruse because we're busy memorizing blighted, beneficent, and bastion.*

*Oops! I didn't put those words in alphabetical order! That's ten points detracted from my grade.

I do agree with Val about the importance of words in context. It was usually the beginning of the year when the lists of commonly misspelled words appeared. Later, there would be words from the books they were reading or the units they were learning.

But we didn't mind the words for memorization. They were not quite as "abstruse" as the words listed above, and DS had fun coming up with goofy sentences. (I also agree that no 2nd-grade kid will know, or care, what an affidavit is, if that really was one of the words!)

I was just going to consult my friend Dr Google on this word list when I noticed your post - good detective work!
This list sounds really odd to me. More so when it is used for 3rd graders (even gifted ones). If they are doing a study on ancient Egypt, they should pick words related to that topic and learn them and use them in the course of the week. Talk to the gifted teacher and let that person know that copying vocab lists off the internet in weekly/alphabetical order is not a productive way to spend everyone's time. Could you maybe let them know that a "context specific" vocab list might be a better fit for the class?

PS: Found an Ancient Egypt vocabulary list online: http://www.tnmuseum.org/files/1143/File/Ancient%20Egyptian%20Vocabulary%20Lesson.pdf

This is an interesting one. I like the words and I would like it if my kid got this list. I agree that some of them are a reach for that grade, but so are a lot of the things we want our kids exposed to.

I guess I would like the list slightly tweaked to make the words more relevant to kids, but just as hard.

BUT I would totally not talk to the teacher about this one, TBH.

How is it going to harm him to learn a few hard words. I agree choosing words related to what the are studying would make more sense but I would suggest the teacher forgot and just googled something and used it without thought. Not a good look but hopefully a one off.

I think "hard" words is just fine. In fact we all have plenty of words in our passive vocabulary, so I don't see not using it as a problem at all; whether a given child will come across a given word is hard enough to predict that I wouldn't try! Even if the child forgets the word, no harm done; the process of thinking about the word is most of the point. I'd expect, out of a list of 10, some to get a "meh" reaction, some to be quite cool, and one or two to be useful.

FWIW my son enjoys vocabulary.com, too.

I think as a parent of two (older) 7 yr olds (but new 3rd graders), my girls would like the list. 2 or 3 words would be fairly difficult to wrap their life experience and interest in, 2 or 3 they know and would use (we use abhor and affinity in conversation as plays on words) and the rest would be new.

Our school (not GT) blends vocab and spelling for all kids. Kiddos that have mastered grade level spelling words get challenge words...last year in 2nd vocab challenge: they had words like determination, exhaustion (core list of words ending in -tion) or patience, perchance (-ence and -ance) . They had to spell them and use them in a sentence. They also did various vocab building activities (word search, story writing, word puzzles, etc). It was a challenge at times, but it should have been and they enjoyed the blend of new words and relevance (often they were connected in some way to something they were doing).

The two words on the challenge list were double bonus. Often they were words that did not fit in the pattern/rule and/or was exceptionally unusual or a word that is tough, but kids showed an interest in.

That is fine with me.

The process of where and the WHY of using that list would bother me though. I would see if as the school year grows, if the lists get more applicable and relevant to theme or topic.

Zen, that is the exact list. That's funny. I'm not shocked, my daughter had the same guy for GATE, I've heard of similar antics in the past. I'm hoping that the peer group will be helpful for him. He has struggled to make friends in the past. The teacher... meh

Colour me sympathetic to the list provided.

Sometimes a new word can be just the tangent needed to spur a new interest. DS, for instance, developed an interest in Medieval life/ephemera when I taught him the word "dissident". Hardly a word a toddler would use in everyday conversation, but it spawned a fascination with other equally obscure language as "crenellated battlements" and various parts of cannons.

To some extent, I think we all delight in being fact curators. I can definitely see some young children thoroughly delighting in dictionary time. I remember how much I loved uncovering a bizarre word and trying to trick my (English major) father with it at that age. That's how I learned about schadenfreude! Imagine a good villainous scheme without schadenfreude...wait...impossible!!

Some words embody so much concept. I still remember watching a Jerry Lewis movie when I was around 7 and there was a gangster who was learning the word prerogative as a word a day smarts building thing. The idea of inalienable rights and rights that attach to a person because of who they are, etc. really fired my brain up (and probably led me to getting into trouble.)

http://abstrusegoose.com/518

Can I just say I would be enormously tempted to print out Zen Scanner's link and to write the sentences on it directly (copying the definitions in my own handwriting if he's supposed to define them), then turn that in?

Yeah, I did get into trouble with teachers for being snarky in high school - why do you ask?

*Applauds*

Just last week, my DD8 got in trouble in class for reading the dictionary and laughing too loud.