Increasing Vocabulary - What We Can Learn From School Activities

Children are amazing. If you have ever had the privilege of spending time around a child as he or she is learning then you will already know just how true that statement is because the amount of information they absorb puts adults to shame.

Of course, there are biological reasons why children are more adept at learning new skills and absorbing new information than adults are but that is not to say that we cannot learn from them and their school activities to improve our prospects as we get older.

For example, close scrutiny of school activities can help the average adult in increasing vocabulary skills and the information outlined below will explain how.

In order to determine what we can learn from school activities, we first need to know how they affect children and encourage learning. After all, vocabulary enhancement is taught in a variety of ways and impacts upon individual children differently, but that is not to say that generalizations cannot be made to highlight the success of certain activities.

Spelling bees are popular school activities and occur in classrooms around the world. Although there is much debate as to whether they are healthy or not given how much pressure is placed on the children participating, there can be little doubt that they are successful in extending language skills.

For example, a child participating in such competitions often exceeds the learning rate of 3600 new words per year. As a result, similar activities can help in increasing vocabulary for adults too, promoting a learning rate that far exceeds the average adult’s vocabulary improvement of 20 words per year.

Spelling bees and other similar activities facilitate learning in a specific way. They introduce a child to a new word, encourage him or her to learn the word and then to pay specific attention to the context in order to reinforce understanding.

That is essential how everyone builds a vocabulary at school, but it is not how adults do so because they tend to skip over unfamiliar words instead of learning them. By paying attention to the child’s method of learning, every adult can translate it into improving his or her vocabulary as well.

Software designed to promote increasing vocabulary actively uses the knowledge taken from observing the way children learn to give adults the impetus to do so too. For example, packages like Ultimate Vocabulary provide customizable flash cards, vocabulary lists and interactive exercises to encourage users to enhance their vocabulary.

All of these techniques started out as school activities so taking a few pointers from our childhoods can certainly help to improve language skills in adulthood.