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difficulty may not always be comparable between
subjects. For instance, the Challenge list for Water
includes words like dehydration whereas that for About
Me contains less adventurous words such as cousin.
You will also find that some words appear on more than
one list. For instance, the word ‘green’ is in the topic lists
Colour and The Park.
To enter the word lists, the child must press . This
will take them into the topic list. The topics are listed
alphabetically. So, if the child presses a letter key, then
all the lists beginning with that letter will be shown. For
instance, under the letter ‘p’, they will find themes such
as Persuasion, Pirates and Smugglers, Poetry, Popstars
and Showbiz, Prehistoric Animals etc. If the child enters
the first two letters, such as 'pr', all the words starting
with ‘pr’ such as Prehistoric Animals and Professions will
come up.
You will see there is a poster showing all the lists in
alphabetical order. You can display this on the wall and
make individual copies for children to help them when
choosing which list they need.
Most of the words in the wordlists are linked to Oxford
Primary Dictionary and are backed up by dictionary defi-
nitions. However, about 20% of the words — more
obscure terms such as “Overlord” in the Anglo-Saxon
History word list and “Allosaurus” in the Prehistoric
Animals word list — do not have a dictionary definition.
However, we felt it was still important that children had
access to these words.
