How to improve your child’s vocabulary

Use new words in conversation

Conversation is still the best vocabulary tool there is. Use new words in ordinary speech rather than saving them for a revision slot, and repeat them across the week: the more your child hears a word used in context, the more likely it is to stick.

When your child comes across a new word, ask them questions with it in rather than handing over the definition, so they get to try it out for themselves. And don’t simplify your own speech around them. Children who hear you use difficult words, and feel comfortable asking what they mean, pick up new words all day long.

Keep it visual, keep it playful

A word list is easier to stick with as a game. Have your child draw a tricky word, act it out, or find a picture for it and pin it somewhere they’ll pass every day.

Scrabble, Boggle and Bananagrams all build vocabulary, and spotting unusual words on a car journey or around the supermarket does the same job as a flashcard. It also helps to learn the occasional word alongside your child rather than only testing them: adults come across words they don’t know too, and seeing that takes the fear out of it.

Read widely, then put the words to use

Reading supplies more new vocabulary than everything else combined, so keep fiction and non-fiction both in rotation, read aloud together as well as leaving your child to read alone, and let magazines and short articles count. A library trip widens the supply beyond whatever is already on the shelf at home.

New words need using soon after they arrive. Put the new word in a sentence, then ask your child to make their own; a couple of written lines with the word in is one of the fastest ways to make it stick, and doubles as creative writing practice. Our guide to getting your child reading more covers the reading habit itself.

Top tips

• Use a new word in conversation the same day your child first comes across it.
• Group words by topic rather than working through the alphabet in order.
• Ask your child to use each new word in a sentence of their own before it counts as learned.
• Keep the daily twenty minutes of reading going, across fiction and non-fiction.
• Bring last week’s words back as well as this week’s; recognition fades quickly without another look.
• If a word won’t stick, give it a picture or a silly sentence and move on. Some words take several tries.

How to prepare

Vocabulary work pays off fastest when it sits alongside regular practice papers, because that’s where you’ll see which words your child still stumbles on. Our spelling and vocabulary series works through key word groups with the kind of exercises your child will meet in verbal reasoning and English papers, and our Children’s Classics workbooks are a gentle way to meet richer vocabulary in the context of a story. Our 11+ vocabulary list is a good starting point if you want a ready-made list to work through.

Vocabulary builds slowly, so little and often is the way in. Ten minutes a day, kept up alongside your child’s practice papers, adds up to far more than a long session once a fortnight.