When teaching English, especially to 8th graders this year, I have to be conscious of opportunities to expand vocabularies. Supposedly, the typical young teen knows between 8 and 12 thousand words – as compared to 20 to 40 thousand for adults. That’s a big gap!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Sometimes I will ask the students if they know a particular word and then have them rate it on a scale of 1 to 5 fingers: 1 finger up indicates “I’ve never seen or heard that word in my entire life” while 5 fingers up means “I know that word well enough to use it in a sentence”.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
What I find is that most words fall in the 2 to 4 finger range – “It sounds familiar but I really couldn’t tell you what it means with confidence.”<\/p>\n\n\n
Here’s another thing I have realized about students and vocabulary: Just because you have the dictionary definition of a word memorized does not mean you truly KNOW that word. A student can memorize a definition and still be unable to use the word correctly in a sentence.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
And it seems to me that if you cannot correctly USE the word, it is not really part of your vocabulary.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Over the past year or two, I have begun to wonder what kind of grip we have on some common biblical terms. Words like “faith” and “wisdom” and “truth” and even “love”. What about “righteousness” and “sin”?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
What if God means something different – deeper – by a particular term than we think he means? What if we’re giving a biblical term 5 fingers when in reality we can’t correctly use it in a sentence? Is it really a part of our working vocabulary?<\/p>\n\n\n
Tomorrow I will try to illustrate what I mean by showing how the Lord expanded my understanding of the phrase “God’s will”.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When teaching English, especially to 8th graders this year, I have to be conscious of opportunities to expand vocabularies. Supposedly, the typical young teen knows between 8 and 12 thousand words – as compared to 20 to 40 thousand for adults. That’s a big gap!\u00a0 Sometimes I will ask the students if they know a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2934,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933\/revisions\/2934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}