Tips on developing your child's vocabulary

A strong vocabulary helps foster understanding, communication, and reading ability.

As children progress through school, they will need to use a range of adjectives, verbs and other facets of grammar in order to achieve higher levels in their literacy work. Expanding their vocabulary is not only necessary for their academic careers, but it’s also an essential life skill that they need to spend time developing.

Children learn a lot from the adults in their lives and there are many ways you can help your child learn new words. Here are some activities you can do with your child to inspire curiosity about words and help expand their vocabulary.

• Encourage your child to search for new words using a dictionary so that they can understand the meaning. The thesaurus will also come in handy to show them words with multiple meanings
• Take your child to a variety of places and initiate a discussion about your surroundings, to help them practice using these new words in a sentence
• Interact with your child while reading by asking them to describe the pictures they see and the meaning of those words
• Play word games such as Scrabble or crossword puzzles, and encourage them to use the word in a sentence
• Let the words come alive by labelling household items using post-it notes to introduce young children to a range of words
• Introduce a new word of the day, and include it in conversations with your child
• Encourage them to read often and independently

Our English programme aims to foster a love of reading and learning in every child. Students range from age two to older, building skills from reading and word recognition,  to advanced level comprehension with the ability to critique complex passages of text. Vocabulary, grammatical precision, memorisation skills and the ability to compose answers are gradually accumulated through different genres of text, familiarising students with both fiction and non-fiction, expanding their knowledge of the world and introducing them to new areas of interest.