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Teach Your Child Lessons: BeginningReads

Tutoring lessons for all 10 levels of BeginningReads. Easy to follow lessons that help students build their vocabulary, writing and comprehension.

Stories of Words: Transportation

Have you ridden a bike? Have you been a passenger in a boat, car, train, or airplane? If so, you’ve used transportation. When new forms of transportation are invented, we often invent new words to describe them or give existing words new meanings.

Stories of Words: Arabic

You may think that most of the Arabic words that came into English refer to animals and customs that are unique to countries in northern Africa and the Middle East, where Arabic is the primary language. But you’re in for some surprises, too. You might be using words with Arabic roots every day to describe the world around you.

Stories of Words: Flight

Since the earliest times, people have looked up to the stars and wanted to travel there. They saw birds flying and tried to build machines that would help them fly, too. Legends tell of people who used wax wings or kites to attempt to fly. These attempts, of course, did not end well. 

Over hundreds of years, people built kites and boomerangs that were inspired by how birds glide through the sky. Only in the last few hundred years, though, did people have the technical skills needed to build flying machines. Once flying machines became real, new words were needed to describe them. 

Stories of Words: Names

What’s your name? Maybe you were named for your mom or dad, or for someone else in your family. Many families name babies after an older relative to honor him or her and to carry on the person’s name. Sometimes places and things are named in this way, too—to honor a person or event, or to keep an important memory alive. Words like this, in which people’s names are used to form new words, are called eponyms. Eponym is a Greek word that means “to give one’s name to something.”