day 115: wordy wednesday

Now that we know how to spell the word Wednesday, we are going to add a new feature to Language Lady 365. If you desire to increase your vocabulary for professional or personal reasons; are preparing for standardized testing or college; or want to help your kids learn vocabulary better, you won’t want to miss Wordy Wednesdays! (Yesk I know it's Thursday--I didn't get this up last night!)

Wordy Wednesday will be a vocabulary-building day each week. Sometimes I will introduce a “word that everybody should know” type of word from test preparation or collections with these types of lists. Other times we will focus on prefixes, suffixes, and roots. Basically, all types of vocabulary learning—your weekly “shot” of wordsmith learning!

At the beginning of the year, I described the importance of roots and affixes in helping our children learn vocabulary: “Discussing words (roots, affixes, etc.) should be a part of our daily discussion with our kids. Even if our kids go to school, we have to look at ourselves as our children’s first teachers. There are so many things that we can teach them casually—homeschoolers or not.”

Not long ago in literature class, our son (Joshua, one of our TFT teachers) asked the students what words they knew that contained the prefix “pro,” meaning “for.” He got the usual answers—pro-life; prolific; pro-football, etc. And then his clever “little brother,” Josiah, said, “’Propane’---means that we are ‘for pain’!” Have fun with vocabulary building—and your kids will not forget it, for sure (nor will you)!

So today, we will start with a common root—a root that can help you unlock the meaning of many other words: gen.

GEN is a root meaning birth, race, or kind.

From this root, we get many common words that most of us are familiar with, including, but not limited to, the following list:

1. Generous
2. Generate
3. Generation
4. Genealogy
5. Gender
6. Genocide
7. Generic

But roots are not limited to the beginnings of words—they are found buried within longer words as well. Consider the following words with gen somewhere in them. How does the meaning of gen—birth, race, or kind—fit into the meanings of these words:

1.    Agency

2.    Intelligence

3.    Resurgent

4.    Agenda

5.    Allergen

6.    Pathogen

7.    Oxygen

8.    Carcinogen

9.    Divergent

10. Emergency

11. Degenerate

12. Negligence

13. Legends

14. Estrogen

15. Homogenate

16. Ingenuity