Encouraging pupils to take a machine home and demon-
strate it to their parents could be both an enjoyable and
a useful exercise for many of them.
Although some of the lists fall into a specific curriculum
area, many of them can be used across the school sub-
jects. They are intended for use in all the Key Stage 2
curriculum areas and can often be used as a way of link-
ing subjects together. Quite apart from subjects like
English, geography and history where they may be most
obviously useful, they can provide the basis for some
interesting study of the way English words relate to other
modern languages. Children are often fascinated by the
ways in which words are built up, how they relate to
each other and how apparently different words have sim-
ilar stems or Latin derivations. Although the lists have
not been devised for this particular purpose, they may
give teachers a starting point for this sort of class dis-
cussion or study.
The National Curriculum requires that pupils’ vocabular-
ies be extended through activities that encourage their
interest in words, including exploration of word games.
All the word games traditionally used in the classroom or
on long car journeys will be enlivened by these readily
accessible banks of words. Teachers will have their own
ideas about which games work best with their pupils.
Some will use board games such as scrabble; others will
use word cards with the more hesitant readers to play
dominoes or to set up a game of ‘word bingo’. In this
each child has, say, ten words and the teacher reads out
words from an identical list. The pupil has to recognise
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