Building Students' Vocabulary

My children have fairly good vocabularies, but I would like to help them develop a more sophisticated vocabulary this summer. Do you know of any good word lists that will help them acquire the vocabulary needed for middle school and high school, and even for college? - Searching
Answer: Helping children build their vocabularies is a rather simple way to keep them connected to learning during the summer. Plus, it offers children the immense benefits of improving their reading comprehension and writing and is likely to raise their SAT verbal scores.
While your children's teachers will have many lists, we especially like several of the lists developed by the American Heritage Dictionary editors because they are challenging and not too lengthy, and are designed for specific levels. For children going into middle school, they have created the following 65 word list:
alliteration, analogy, antibody, aspire, bamboozle, bizarre, boycott, camouflage, chronology, commemorate, deduction, dialogue, divulge, eclectic, enthusiastic, exult, fallacy, flourish, gargoyle, guerilla, guru, hieroglyphics, hypocrisy, immune, inference, introspection, jaunty, jovial, labyrinth, light-year, marsupial, maneuver, mutation, nebula, nocturnal, nuisance, omnivore, outrageous, parasite, plateau, protagonist, quandary, quarantine, quota, random, renaissance, renegade, sacrifice, solstice, stereotype, symbiosis, technique, toxin, tranquility, tumult, ultraviolet, unanimous, undulate, vacillate, vertebrate, virtuoso, voracious, wretched, yacht, zoology
Have your children choose just one word a day each weekday to look up in the dictionary. Then be sure to have them use it with family members at a meal, during a car ride or at some other specific time. During the week, the children should also strive to use previously learned words. At the end of the summer, you can offer them an outing of their choice for diligently working with these words.
If your children are entering high school, you might like to have them work with the list of "100 Words Every High School Freshman Should Know." This list was compiled from summer reading lists for those entering high school. A good list for older high-school students is "100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know." Books with these two lists, along with definitions, example sentences and vocabulary-building suggestions, are available at bookstores. All of the word lists (without definitions) are available online at www.ahdictionary.com. Plus if you visit this Web site, you'll find such vocabulary building activities as word quizzes, weekly word histories, and crossword puzzle solver.