How can parents help their children build a strong vocabulary?

If you have a child in year three or year four then the answer is to read for half an hour a day, have plenty of interesting discussions between you at the table for instance and play some word games like Boggle or Scrabble. Reading and paired reading are of greatest importance.

If your child is in year five then the above should still form the core of your vocabulary work but you will also need to do some active learning (lists of synonyms with tests to check understanding) and some learning through doing test papers.

If your child is coming to preparation later on in year five and has not been an active reader (at least half an hour a day) previously then you can still improve by doing the above although you must recognise that without time the scale of improvements you can make may be limited.

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