Tutoring For All Ages

You’ve still got leftover turkey in the fridge, finals are approaching, and you’re about to start a well-deserved break from school. You may be thinking that studying is the last thing you want to do during your break, but if you’re taking a standardized test in the spring, now is a great time to catch up on all that vocab you know you should have been working on all fall.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: a large and diverse vocabulary is the fastest and easiest route to a great verbal score on your PSAT/SAT/ACT/SSAT/ISEE/take-your-pick.

Improving your vocab doesn’t have to require hours of work per day, and it doesn’t necessarily have to feel like work. Here are a few tips you can use to build up a fantastic vocabulary for free in only a few minutes a day:

• Don’t try to do too much — learn three words per day at most.
• Use free word-a-day sites such as the two listed on our sidebar from Yahoo! and satvocab.com. If you don’t like those words or you want more, try the words at Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day or the Just Vocabulary podcast. Come on, you know you check your e-mail and Facebook every day. Make the word-a-day part of your routine!
• Actually use each day’s words. Make a point of trying to use them whenever you can (“I find Dad culpable for putting the empty milk carton back in the fridge”). Get your family involved — make a game out of it!
• Try reading higher-end publications like The New York Times or Newsweek. They use great vocab words in their articles all the time. Pick an article that interests you, and when you see a word you don’t recognize, look it up. If you do this, you’ll be practicing both vocab and reading comprehension, which is a win-win!
• Keep a log of your vocab words (it can be as simple as just a piece of paper by your computer with the words scribbled down). Every so often, check the list and quiz yourself. Going back to a vocab word after you haven’t seen it for a while is one way to make sure you’ve learned it for good.
• Challenge yourself with exercises like word association, word puzzles, and crosswords. Vocabulary.com is an example of a site that provides free puzzles to help you learn words.
• Learn word roots. Knowing the roots of words is like knowing the blueprints of a building: even if you aren’t sure what’s in every room, you can find your way around. If you have no idea what pantheon means, but you know that the root “pan” means all and the root “theo” means having to do with gods/religion, then you’d have no problem picking from a multiple-choice question that a pantheon is a temple dedicated to all gods. Word roots are extremely powerful.