Including Word Etymology On Knowledge Organisers

In my last blog post I wrote about the basics of knowledge organisers - if you don't yet use them, that blog post will be a good starting point for you: https://www.aidansevers.com/post/using-knowledge-organisers-in-primary

Knowledge Organisers, Key Fact Sheets, 100% Sheets - whatever you call them - are de rigueur right now, and for good reason: they help both teachers and children with teaching and learning. For teachers, they are a good guide as to what they need to teach (and the act of creating them can be a very clarifying process). For children, it's a one stop shop for what they need to know, and is the starting point for using various methods of retrieval practice to learn the information that their teachers think they need to know.

One of the great realisations (it's more of a blindingly obvious reawakening) of the last few years, is that having a good vocabulary is key to understanding pretty much anything and that we must help children explicitly to develop their vocabulary.

If you don't know what a word means on its own, then how can you tell what it means in a sentence? And if you don't know what a sentence is trying to get across, how can you understand a whole paragraph? And if you can't work out what a paragraph mea... you get the picture: vocabulary is really important.

Often, when teaching a unit of work, in geography, or history say, there is a lot of terminology that is necessary to the explanation, but which itself is complex to explain. As a result, many teachers employing Knowledge Organisers and the like have taken to including key vocabulary too: words which will help children understand and talk about the concepts and facts they are learning.

But developing one's vocabulary isn't always easy. But, as Alex Quigley wrote, 'Etymology is a goldmine of an opportunity (too often missed) for teachers of every subject discipline'. He goes on to say that 'The stories that underpin our language can often illuminate the ideas and meanings we seek to communicate' - sounds good, right? Note the use of that word 'story' - our minds privilege story, and we learn stuff well if it is presented in story form. And what is etymology if it is not the story of a word? A story which can help us learn the meaning of that word.

Not only does learning the etymology of a word help us to understand the one word in question, it also arms us with knowledge which helps us to discover the meaning of other words that share the same root. For example, if children know that the root of the word 'terrain' is the Latin terra meaning 'earth' or 'land', they might be able to discover something of the meaning of the word 'territory', 'terrestrial' or 'terrace'. Further, they might come across the word 'terrarium' and link it to their knowledge of what an aquarium is and come to the understanding that a terrarium is like an aquarium without the water, but with earth in it instead.

Coming back to the Knowledge Organisers: if it contains information you want the children to learn, including word definitions, then why not also include some etymological information which might help the learning to stick as well as provide the basis for future understanding of word meaning?

It's simple enough to do. Here are some examples (click on the images to see them in more detail):

In order to create primary-level information about each word's etymology I usually use a combination of the google dictionary (just google the word + etymology) and etymonline. Using these resources I can usually create a child-friendly version, often opting for the 'deepest' root, usually Germanic, Latin or Greek rather than the various incarnations of the word. Here's an example:

If I were to use this word with a primary child (I probably wouldn't need to), I'd just choose to give the following: from Latin in meaning 'into' and carn- meaning 'flesh'. To get that meaning I also had to click through the link to the page for 'incarnate':

Once that definition were given, we could talk about how 'in flesh' has come to mean 'in human form'. We could also link to Chili Con Carne (meaning 'chili with meat/flesh') and the link to other Latin languages that use carne to mean meat. That's the sort of thing that is much easier to remember because it is a little strange, even though it makes total sense.

Obviously, putting the etymology on the Knowledge Organiser is only step one - what you do with that next is up to you. Certainly, you'd want to begin by teaching more around those words, displaying the words, definitions and etymology in your classroom, playing matching games, having multiple choice quizzes about the word meanings, locating those words in texts, finding other words with the same root words and working out their meanings... there are myriad possibilities.

If vocabulary is the gateway to knowledge learning, and understanding etymology is a path to vocabulary development, then half an hour spent on providing the etymology of your unit of work's key words is probably time well spent - have a go, and I'd love to see some your examples! For more on teaching vocabulary, see my TES article 'Why Etymology Boosts Spelling And Vocabulary: https://www.tes.com/news/sats-why-etymology-boosts-vocabulary-and-spelling For No-Quiz Retrieval Practice Techniques, click here: https://www.aidansevers.com/post/no-quiz-retrieval-practice-techniques For my blog post, Using Mnemonics For Retrieval Practice, follow this link: https://www.aidansevers.com/post/using-mnemonics-for-retrieval-practice For more information about using Knowledge Organisers in Primary, I've written a short overview and provided links to other educators who have written about their use:

If you would like Aidan to work with you on developing the teaching of vocabulary and spelling at your school, please visit his website at https://www.aidansevers.com/services and get in touch via the contact details that can be found there.