First 1000 words for young learners
Our new educational game app—WILD WORD LEARNER—is now available in Apple’s App Store and in Google Play. Included in the app are close to 1000 carefully selected words from WILD spread over 12 great topics. The app is free with the first 4 topics (over 200 words) preloaded. It’s a perfect game for your kindergarten or first grade class—both for learning new words and for having fun!
The app’s thoughtful illustrations and animations will help young learners grasp the meaning of words at a glance. The audio pronunciations will create and strengthen the link between the sound of each word and its meaning. For more advanced learners, the simple but descriptive full-sentence definitions and examples will get them started in reading for meaning.
A more expansive resource for word-learning is, of course, our interactive WILD dictionary itself. It can be used alongside the app or as the next step once your students have mastered the 1000 words presented in the app.
This month’s highlight: teaching resources contributed by our teachers
We often receive requests for new features from our users. Sometimes, users simply find creative solutions by using Wordsmyth resources with other online tools. The highlight of this month is a Youtube video created by Ms. Michelle Austin. In this video, she demonstrates how she uses Wordsmyth content to create a Kahoot! Check it out!
Also, check out our newly updated Vocabulary Center, with more activities. And don’t forget that we have WILD for K-2 and our Children’s Dictionary for upper elementary school students.
Working together. Have any questions? We’ll try to answer them here. Your requests, feedback, and creative ideas will help us to improve our resources and tools. Contact us and share your ideas with the Wordsmyth community.
Word Awareness
Our mission is to increase word awareness, and to enrich our relationship with words and their meanings. We believe this is crucially important in education and in life. But often it isn’t clear why or how words can be so important. Do they really deserve more than a dutiful effort to memorize new words and meanings?
In an Edutopia article, Rebecca Alber offers three quotes as reminders of the importance of vocabulary study:
• Vocabulary is the best single indicator of intellectual ability and an accurate predictor of success at school. — W.B. Elley
• Because each new word has to be studied and learned on its own, the larger your vocabulary becomes, the easier it will be to connect a new word with words you already know, and thus remember its meaning. So your learning speed, or pace, should increase as your vocabulary grows. — Johnson O’Connor
• We think with words, therefore to improve thinking, teach vocabulary. — A. Draper and G. Moeller
Searching for inspiration: Please send us your favorite quote about words and vocabulary. We’ll share the results in our next Newsletter.
Thank you!
The Wordsmyth Team