Marie’s Words: Vocabulary for the Left Brained Learner

We practice a Charlotte Mason(ish) style of learning in our homeschool.  Most of our learning is literature based.

My children learn much of their vocabulary simply by inferring the meaning of words through the context of their reading.

But there are a lot of words that the typical elementary-aged child may not find in reading material that is geared toward their age-level.

The English language is so full of descriptive, colorful words, and I want my children to be able to harness as many of those words as they can in their writing!

But they can’t do that if they don’t know what those words are.  That’s why I am so happy to have discovered Marie’s Words.

 

Marie’s Words is an amazing tool for my visual and “left-brained” learners.

 

 

 

There are so many words in the set (550 to be exact) for them to learn, and each word is taught in a memorable way.  Each card has a picture on the front that contains the word, along with a visual cue for remembering the meaning of the word.

My son demonstrated this in a short video which I’ve included below:

 

I love that the words come in alphabetical order so that if we come across a word in our reading that we’d like to focus on for vocabulary that week, I can easily find it in the box and pull it out so the kids can study it.

 

Marie’s Words also comes with instructions for a couple different games that we can play together using the cards.  Learning while playing?  Sounds good to me!

 

(Not to be outdone, my daughter wanted to create her own video review of Marie’s Words.  Warning: she’s long-winded. 🙂 )

 

Along with the visual cues on the front of the card, the back of the card gives the pronunciation, the definition,  a short explanation of the visual cue, and a sentence containing the word.

 

Marie’s Words is appropriate for ages 5 and up, although I think a lot of the words are a little bit difficult for a 5-year-old to understand.  That is fine with me, since I homeschool all of my children together – this way I have vocabulary words on the level of my 5-year-old, but I will still be able to use Marie’s Words with my children all the way through high school!

 

My 5-year-old wanted to participate in the videos too (of course!)  I’m sharing his so that you can see an approximate level of difficulty for that age.  (Sorry, he goes a little off topic!)

 

 

 

You can find Marie’s Words as a stand-alone product here.

-OR-

Purchase Timberdoodle’s entire 4th grade curriculum kit here, which includes Marie’s Words.  This is the best deal if you 1. have a 4th grader 2. Need to save time, sanity, and money by purchasing your entire curriculum all in one set.