Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion GATE program just started...vocab words are HARD!

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.