Sharing what I know

Thought I’d share an email I just sent out to colleagues who were requesting information on how to teach Greek and Latin Roots. I got some of the ideas from a web site a long time ago. I have the link at work.

This is what a good plan looks like that’s easy and not hard. Before I lay it out. Let me say that research says that looking up definitions in dictionaries is not the most effective way to learn vocabulary. Perhaps I can share a couple methods at a PD (Ugh, did I just volunteer). Or I can do what I do best and email . Below is how I introduce Etymology currently. FYI, my 11th graders have received this intro already.

1. Write Etymology on the board. Explain that Etymology is “The study of the early form of a word”. I show this by breaking up the word ETYM (early form of a word) and OLOGY (the study of). I further explain that learning the most common roots will help them in ALL classes and especially the SAT.

2. Next I write HIPPOPOTAMUS on the board. HIPPOS means “Horse” and POTAMUS means “River”. So I have fun telling them how every root has a meaning and they may not see these two, they can see how roots are put together.

3. Write MALARIA on the board. Underline MAL and ask what they think it means. They always guess “Bad” since it’s that in Spanish. I use this as an opportunity to explain that Spanish, English, French, and Italian are all Latin languages. Next we break down MALARIA: MAL = bad, ARIA = air.

4. At this point you’ll see the LOVE doing these. This is when I give them the work sheet which I will attach. This is easy to edit for each week of Roots. We go through each root and the kids popcorn out what words they know that have that root. I have them try to guess the meaning based on the similarities of the words being yelled out. I give them the meaning if they can’t guess it and I break it down a little like this:

CRED: Kids yell, “Incredible” “Credible” “Credulous” “Creed”. They try to guess. Then I tell them CRED means BELIEVE so if it’s INcredible it’s NOT believable.

VERT/VERSE: Kids yell, “vertical”, inverse, reverse, perverse , etc. I usually use INVERSE and ask what do they do when they do the INVERSE operation. Someone figures out that it means TO TURN.

This site has an alphabetical root dictionary that is very thorough: http://www.learnthat.org/vocabulary/pages/view/roots.html#a

I hope this helps. Let me know if you need more information.

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