Do you want your kids to have a rich, expressive vocabulary? Sure you do! There’s really only one way to ensure your kids can easily pluck le mot juste from their magnificent brains at will: read Great Books to them!
Take a good, hard look at your kids’ book lists from school: do you see many titles you recognize? If so, great! If not, it’s up to you to expose your kids to great literature. Yes, there are some good modern books—I really liked Wonder. But no modern children’s book can touch books written generations ago for vocabulary, syntax, allusion, and cultural literacy.
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When I was a kid, I loved reading my uncle’s Hardy Boys books when we visited my grandparents! Did you know that The Hardy Boys series was dumbed down? You have to find an old copy of the books—and I mean old, like a copy published before 1959!
However, you’ll find that even with a lot of the guts chopped out, The Hardy Boys series is still highbrow stuff compared to today’s stupid kid lit brands like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants.
How to Teach Vocabulary with Great Books
- I underline vocabulary words quickly as I read a book to my kids. In The Tower Treasure, one of the most useful vocabulary words we encountered was exultant. Surprise, surprise: exultant has popped up in every other Great Book we’ve read! It’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: once you learn about something, you see it everywhere!
- I also underline words they know that are used in a different way in the book than we use them in modern language. A simple example of this is awesome, a word kids use every day to mean cool. In classic literature, awesome means awe-inspiring. (And cool means slightly cold.)
- I do not interrupt reading to explain words, except when I’m pretty sure they can’t understand the meaning of the entire paragraph without knowing what a particular word or phrase means. When you read Great Books to your kids, they’ll comprehend way more if you power through instead of stop every few sentences to explain something. Think Shakespeare: If you read a play straight through, you get it. If you stop after every bit of dialogue to look up words, you may learn the words, but you’ll miss their meaning in context.
- After we read, I ask my kids to define each word I underlined (and the meaning of words in the context of the book). If they can explain what a word means, super. If they can’t, they look up the definition and write out just the definition that was used in the book. Kids need to know how to look up words in a dictionary and a thesaurus! Get a good set—I love Oxford dictionaries because they include etymology and older definitions American dictionaries leave out. Sometimes even Oxford fails to reveal the definition we’re looking for, at which point it’s Google to the rescue!
- I only ask my kids to define vocabulary words for the first few chapters of a book, because it’s likely we’ll encounter the same words repeatedly as we continue in that book. Plus, I don’t want to associate reading with testing—loose as our “vocabulary tests” are, I want “Let’s read!” to always elicit a positive response!
Great Books to Read to Your BIG Kids #4:
The Hardy Boys #1 The Tower Treasure by Franklin W. Dixon
Remember when I said The Hardy Boys were dumbed down in the 60s? The original 1927 edition has 216 pages; the revised edition has 180. If it’s possible, find the original version, or the Applewood reprints of the original text.
But do read The Tower Treasure to your kids, whichever edition you find! I didn’t know the books had been edited when I read The Tower Treasure to my kids, so we read the “modern” version. The 60s were still head and shoulders above today’s times in education, so you may be surprised at how many vocabulary words you don’t know!
A Hardy Boys mystery is the perfect Halloween book for kids! Check out my Great Books for BIG Kids series!
More from All Day Mom on Great Halloween Books for Kids:
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven and Short Stories
Follow my 31 Days of Great Books to Read to Your BIG Kids series! Subscribe to get the Kindle book FREE in November!
This article is linked on Learning Kid Linkup #15!
Which series is better: Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew?
