Fun with Words

We have a little institution that we try to, well, institute several times a week that we call "Daddy school." This is a combination of educational endeavors generally engaged in as a family in the coziness of the evening. Generally quite a bit of math and science (aimed mostly at the oldest two) and a little reading, sometimes some fun games. Good stuff.

Tonight after working our way as a group through an interesting puzzle in Ria's math book, I pulled out a little grammar supplement that I thought the kids would enjoy. Little did I know how much that would be the case!

We've only worked our way through a few pages and instead of doing written work with a dictionary, it's more of an oral group effort. The book is titled "Smart Starters: Language Arts" and it has a little exercise sheet each day that are intended to improve vocabulary. Well, as usual, we tend to use these sorts of resources all wrong. As I mentioned above, we just played with the exercises orally and we're using it for all the wrong ages, but that was part of the fun - seeing where the kids could guess a meaning from the context, joking about different words that sounded similar, and, well, laughing a lot.

Here are two samples of the exercises we did:

Could you barbecue a query?

Name two places you would like to sojourn. (These kinds were fun because I would give my own examples first and the younger ones could guess the general idea from the context.)

(Emphasis in the original).

FreeRice.com

After seeing this on numerous sites (I think I first saw it over at Karen's), we started playing this fun vocabulary game over the weekend. Finally a "time-waster" I can get behind and not just because of the donation of food to the poor, but because it's well-designed to improve vocabulary. They test you with a few beginning words to get you to a point where you're being constantly challenged. It seems to work well!

UPDATE: We're also finding this travel/geography game to be a lot of fun.

The Gawain Green Game

We're reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (translated by J.R.R. Tolkien) for our teen literature discussion this week. Like Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse, it's a story/poem that begs to be read aloud and so I've been doing just that.

According to our T.C. lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it's written in "alliterative verse". Put more simply, we've been delighting in the fun alliteration (repeating of the same first letter in numerous words) and the kids have made a game of me asking them randomly what letter showed up in the previous line. Bernie (almost 8 years old) has taken a particular delight in this and it's rather funny how it's kept everyone interested in the read-aloud. (Even Kate is attempting to get in on the act and has made some actually progress in figuring out what sound comes first in a word).

And now the storyline has gotten just a little more complex. I think I'll take a peek before I share it with all of them. :)

E-P-A-U-L-E-M-E-N-T

We're watching the National Spelling Bee on ABC right now and boy is it exciting! "Our" one student from Wisconsin - and the only girl left - is awesome (epaulement is the word she just spelled - I can often guess the Latin and German ones, but I have no clue when it comes to French)! We're having lots of fun here trying to guess how to spell the words and cheering everyone on. I lost track of whether there are any homeschoolers left or not.

The Medieval Lyric

An early-music-and-linguist-type-person I recently made the acquaintance of told me about a program called The Medieval Lyric at Mount Holyoke College. It sounds terribly interesting, though I haven't had a chance to read through the website yet. I might have to spring for their CD set some day.

Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power by Josef Pieper

This is an interesting and hard-hitting little book (about 50 pages long) about the significance and dangers of the manipulation of language. It is deeply rooted in Plato's thoughts on rhetoric and the true purpose of communication. Written in German in 1974, the English translation was published by Ignatius Press in 1992. Here are a few interesting quotes:

So writes John Wild, the American scholar and expert on Plato: "The Sophist appears as a true philosopher, more so than the philosopher himself." (pg. 29)

"Is it not obvious", he wonders in his dialogue Phaedrus, "that even those who have a genuine message of truth and reality must first court the favor of the people so they will listen at all? Is there not such a thing as seduction to the truth?"

Be this as it may - this much remains true: wherever the main purpose of speech is flattery, there the word becomes corrupted and necessarily so. And instead of genuine communication, there will exist something for which domination is too benign a term; more appropriately we should speak of tyranny, of despotism.

Public discourse, the moment it becomes basically neutralized with regard to a strict standard of truth, stands by its nature ready to serve as an instrument in the hands of any ruler to pursue all kinds of power schemes. Public discourse itself, separated from the standard of truth, creates on its part, the more it prevails, an atmosphere of epidemic proneness and vulnerability to the reign of the tyrant.

The abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word.

Consequently, one may be entirely knowledgeable about a thousand details and nevertheless, because of ignorance regarding the core of the matter, remain without basic insight. This is a phenomenon in itself already quite astonishing and disturbing. Arnold Gehlen labeled it "a fundamental ignorance, created by technology and nourished by information."

A new word Bernie used today

(and I want to remember)

... halfhazardly

:)

Fun Math Words

mathematical
Pythagorean Theorem
tetrahedron
geometric
trigonometry
Fibonacci
consecutive
convex
icosahedron
dodecahedron
octahedron
stereoscopic
oscillation
symmetrical
abacus
equiangular
polyalphabetic substitution
infinitesimal
calculator
conchoid of Nicomedes
googolplex
transcendental probability
quadrilateral
equilibrium
perpendicular
hypotenuse
Thales of Miletus
Anaximander

Some Words (and Names and Phrases) We Like...

triskaidekaphobia (particularly pertinent today)
micropigmentation
ophthalmologist
permeability
paleomagnetism
fractional crystallization
hydraulic conductivity
Eratosthenes
Copernicus
Archimedes
bioluminescent
dodecahedron
pagination

Leaving room (and time) to take advantage of enthusiasm for learning as it appears in our family, is an important essential part of our homeschool/educational philosophy.

Wow!

Now G.K. Chesterton has answered the Map Guys' Geography Meme!!

Gus and Ria are keeping track of all the responses over on The Map Guys' blog. I do searches for them a couple of times a day (they're not allowed to use search engines yet). They're SO excited.

I think GKC would approve of our new family project. (I think we need a name for this one - The Great Word Project - or something else understood in the tone of "Bill Nye the Science Guy"). After the kids had been begging for some more fun words like "argillaceous" (still inspired by Akeelah and the Bee) to learn to spell, I had to get serious. We now have eight card boxes and hundreds of blank index cards and we're doing some serious searching for "fun" words and organizing them into categories. Terri wrote out eight or ten word cards from a Latin derivates list yesterday. Bernie copied some words out from Sound Beginnings so she could have some easier ones. We saw the Princess Bride and immediately had to write down "inconceivable" (we couldn't find the word "hippopotanic" in the dictionary - maybe I don't have the spelling right yet). Ria dutifully looked up about 25 words yesterday from the 80 words she had copied down from Akeelah and the Bee and recorded the language of origin and definition. Gus did a little of everything and took special care to organize the geography section properly. Ria got scolded for leaving indelible pens in the reach of Frank and we both went "Oooh! "indelible"!". You get the idea.

I found a few interesting sites which we've been using to unearth fun words:

Merriam-Webster Online (you can use the unabridged dictionary for free if you're willing to watch a commercial - just don't close that window down in between times, or you'll have to watch the commercial again).

Constellation List
Geology Words
Music Words
Technology Words

Some of our best learning comes from these "child-led" projects. I make a concerted effort to leave enough wiggle room in our studies to be able to put other things aside when a great moment like this comes up. I think this wiggle room has been really important for them in developing a love of learning as well. Not that there aren't any requirements in our home (there certainly are), but I'm battling against my own tendencies to latch onto even unnecessary conventions and keep my priorities on helping the kids really learn. This is hard sometimes!

I think one of the roles of a teacher is to cultivate - because learning isn't only about what the children know, but also about what they LOVE. So it's nice to see some of those efforts (like encouraging a love of language, but avoiding structured vocabulary programs) pay off once in awhile. :)

Spelling Bee Hive

This looks like a neat kids' site from Merriam-Webster.

The Spelling Bee Hive

Perfect for the spelling frenzy spinning around our house right now.

Scrabble Mania

Watching Akeelah and the Bee has caused a surge of interest in playing Scrabble around here.

Works for me. :)

Akeelah and the Bee

We just borrowed Akeelah and the Bee (finally!) from Netflix and enjoyed it very much. It's a fictional story of an 11 year old girl from South Los Angeles who competes in the National Spelling Bee. Quite a good family film (except for a handful of words - it is rated PG - pretty understated for the difficult world Akeelah is growing up in).

I was interested in the quote hanging in Dr. Larabee's office and found it online:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous.
Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us -- it's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others

-Marianne Williamson

There's some real truth in there - especially in the context of Akeelah being ashamed of her gifts because she's teased at school for being a "brainiac" and she has a hard time "fitting in".

On a side note, I enjoyed the little plug in the movie for studying Latin to help you appreciate and understand words better. It really struck me that today, aside from homeschooling and a few charter schools, you pretty much have to be enrolled in a private academy to have the opportunity to study Latin in school. Our local public high school, which is about as good as public schools get, doesn't even offer Latin (you can take Spanish, German, French or Japenese). What a shame. Perhaps it is up to homeschoolers to grow up to be teachers and bring Latin back to the public schools.

In Case You've Always Wondered...

...what's on our fridge, Ria posted our current Magnetic Poetry offerings on her blog. We had them put away for a long time and just remembered to take them back out a week ago or so. Various people will create sentences which grow and change (sometimes mysteriously) over time. It's a lot of fun. Usually Ria and I will get caught playing with it when we had intended to just get a drink of water before bedtime.

..."a voice that made men drop drawn swords."

We're reading Chesterton's The Man Who was Thursday aloud (well, I'm reading it to Ria and Gus), and I loved that phrase so much I just had to share.