Six good books for learning vocabulary

Now that we all know why a large vocabulary is good for happy homes, I’ll share with you some of the books we use to teach vocabulary in our home.

For little ones, you can’t go past photo vocabulary books.

Good examples of these include My First Words or First 100 Words or My Big Book of Everything.  When you look for a vocabulary book for a small child, check that the pictures are realistic, so that it closely matches your child’s real life experience.  Look for books that organise words into groups and themes, so that it helps your child understand where that word fits in the world.  For example, pages of food words, pages of clothing words, etc.

You Choose! is a perpetual favourite in our house.  The book invites you to make up a new life for yourself – the number of original stories you can make from this book must number in the millions as the options are seemingly endless.  Each page has a question (eg. Where would you live? What would your house look like? Who would your friends and family be?  What would you wear? What would your job be?) and there are beautiful hand drawn pictures of the scores of options of answers to each question.  This book provides a great opportunity to develop specific vocabulary within semantic categories.  For example, the answers to “Where would you sleep?” include divan, water bed, bunk bed, feather bed, camping cot, cushions, hammock, etc. Miss Two LOVES this book and demanded it be read multiple times a day – no reading is ever the same!

Possum and Wattle: My Big Book of Australian Words is a new addition to our house.  In fact, it’s been here less than 2 hours.  And the girls and I love it.  It has big colourful drawings in an aboriginal art style.  Words include particularly Australian ones like bandicoot, galah, numbat, quandong, wobbegong and willy-willy.  But it also includes fairly universal words, such as bat, frog, nest and rainbow.  A wonderful book for children learning first words, or those who want to expand their vocabulary.  And for Australian parents living overseas who are worried that their children will grow up thinking that an opal (opel) is a type of car!

Have you discovered the Fancy Nancy stories yet?  If you have a preschool or older daughter, I’m sure you have.  They are a firm favourite in our house (those who know my children will know exactly why!).  Fancy Nancy is a little girl who likes everything sparkly and posh.  She likes to use big words, but is very good at explaining what they mean in the story.  For example, “Fuschia is my favourite colour – that’s a fancy word for purple” and “We are having parfaits for dinner – that’s a fancy word for ice cream.”  There are many different Fancy Nancy books – all that we’ve read so far have been lovely.  Miss Three got a copy of Fancy Nancy’s Favorite Fancy Words for her birthday – it’s an A-Z list of extended vocabulary, including words such as accessories, dapper, fiasco and zany.  They are slowly becoming part of my children’s language – when she tipped over a box of hair bands during the week Miss Three exclaimed, “Oh, my accessories!”

This is just the tip of the iceberg – there are many thousands of books that are suitable for using to learn vocabulary skills.  Try to find ones that extend your child’s set of words, that have interesting and appropriate pictures, and put the new word into a category or context.  Most of all, try to make the book-sharing time enjoyable so that your child associates books and reading and learning with having fun.  Don’t forget that whilst books are very important, nothing beats the real world for learning new words.  So if you can, try to link up the pictures and words in the books with the real thing.

What books do you read with your child that are good for developing vocabulary skills?

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