The Vocabulary for 8th Grade: Weekly Activities to Boost Your Word Power

We purchased this book as a supplement for my grand-daughter’s homeschool curriculum. We love it! It covers all of the basics of spelling words like the old school way. It doesn’t just have you memorize a definition it helps you understand the word, know its meaning, know its spelling, and use in various sentences and forms. Excellent way of teaching and supplementing. I encourage you to purchase and add as a supplement for any 8th grader.

Amazing book

This is a TEN star product for my 8th grade stepson. I’m not sure if it’s just boys or that parents and schools have deflected from teaching students proper vocabulary and instead allow them to say, “Do the thing” and the like, but regardless of the cause, my stepson’s vocabulary has remained juvenile and meager to say the least. (We all agree my fifth grade son’s vocabulary is far superior.) At first I eliminated the verbs “to be,” “to do,” “to have,” “to get,” “to go,” and “to put” and all of their formats, along with simple adjectives like “fast” and “slow” and “good” and “bad” and let me tell you, our 8th grader could no longer form a coherent sentence, as I had eliminated his entire word bank in one small fell swoop. Because his school hardly assigns any homework, we have required him to read 30 pages after school each day for a year, but that has somehow not improved his vocabulary. We also lead by example by not using slang and truly always speaking correctly at a higher level, but that hasn’t worked. I bought the popular 6-8th grade vocab book on here last summer and it failed to resonate. I searched further and discovered this book, ordered it, and each day after school he must complete one lesson. We declare this the winner, and here’s why: the kiddo has actually added plenty of these vocab words to his daily speech! The lessons are short and sweet (15 minutes max), but tremendously effective. I LOVE that the very first part of each lesson requires the student to read a sentence for each of the five words and, using context clues (!!!), write down what he thinks the vocab word means. Then he looks up the words in the back to compare and contrast, and using the proper definition, completes the remainder of the assignment. We find it invaluable that our kiddo is given the opportunity to fail first, then learn, with this book. The other part we really enjoy is the provided Q&A he must conduct using the vocab words...this helps the parent correct mispronunciation. I instruct him to say the word correctly five times in a row, and henceforth, it’s forever corrected. For anyone who thinks their kids need to improve/expand their vocabulary, I urge you to give these workbooks (we also bought the 6th grade book for our 6th grader...easier, but it should be) a try. No one’s kids receive anywhere close to enough homework to solidify the lessons learned in public school nowadays since lazy parents have complained so much (squeaky wheel gets the grease), so do your kids a favor for their futures and supplement their lessons. Start here.

good

My 14 year old has a really good vocabulary but I wanted something to boost it and challenge him a little bit. These lessons offer five words per lesson with an introduction to each word in context clues and then two more quick exercises working to improve familiarity with the words. I think it's just enough to introduce the words without making the lesson so long it takes away from the rest of the school day. We will probably do these about twice a week. I'd suggest if you want your student to have more practice with these words you could easily ask for them to utilize the words throughout the rest of the school day or in their Daily Journal Etc. I like that the introduction and exercises are pretty simple so that you can then cater any further instruction with the words to your own students needs and abilities.