Customer Reviews

Vocabulary from Classical Roots - A

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As a tutor for language arts, I am always looking for better tools to help students build word power. This series is wonderful. It's well organized and teaches roots and related words together. The exercises are sufficiently challenging to keep even advanced students interested.

I've taught English for over 25 years, and this is the best source for classical vocabulary that I have ever found. I am impressed by the different levels that are in the series. It helps students to go beyond the regular vocabulary lesson to really understand what our words mean and where they came from.

I really like the concept of Vocabulary from Classical Roots. The student does not learn individual, non-related vocabulary words, but groups of words associated with a latin root. Once the roots are learned then the student can identify challenging words through the root. The program also takes the words and gives practice in the use of the word - whether it is a noun, adj., verb, etc.
I didn't give it a full five stars, because some will think it is dry. There are no cute drawings and comics here, just a no-nonsense vocab program. There is a review built in, but it comes after several lessons. It would be great if there was some type of review to continuously study the roots. I need to prepare my own concentration game or something for that.

A great book to teach middle school students important vocabulary for life.

Nancy Flowers, co-author of this book, taught at my high school. She was ditz then, and apparently she still is, as this poorly designed, poorly laid out book is sheer torture to use. The authors take a Latin or Greek word and then give a few English words related to it as vocabulary lessons. First problem: they often use non-standard definitions of words - check the meaning of the words in Merriam-Webster and you'll often find this book is off the mark in how they define words. Next, the choice of words is bizarre, and many of them are rather obscure and not grade appropriate. Worst of all is the layout of the book; every page is cluttered and it is quite difficult to extract the core information of the lesson from all the visual clutter.

Also, Nancy Flowers used to grade the AP exams and is obsessed with word analogies. For a 6th grader, these are not the most helpful or relevant skill to learn. Kids that age would be better off focusing on a deeper grasp of the meaning words, not on doing SAT prep work.

Get a better book for your child, there are many to choose from.

When my daughter's Vocabulary: Classical Roots came up missing I thought, "Oh, no! This will be very expensive to replace." But happily I was wrong, it was less than $10, and we received it within two weeks. Thanks a bunch!