Lone Star Learning- Greek and Latin Roots

 Do you teach children who excel when they have visual clues? Then we may have found just what you are looking for! Lone Star Learning has a plethora of great resources available in their "Get the Picture" vocabulary cards. These cards each give a visual clue to the meaning of the vocabulary word. Many different sets are available for Kindergarten age up through Middle School. Whether you are a public, private, or home school teacher, have one student, or 200, you can probably find a set to help you teach. 







We received the set of Greek and Latin word roots. This set contains 60 cards (5 1/2" x 8 1/2") of 30 roots each of Latin and Greek.  This set currently retails for $39.99 and is suggested for ages 3rd-8th grades. The cards have a plastic-type coating on the front, allowing them to stand up to multiple uses and still look good. If you're wanting them to hang around your classroom, or house, or you have designs to use them with lots of students, Lone Star Learning sells a set of vinyl pockets for an additional $12.99. The Greek roots have a border of green, the Latin have a purple border. This was easy for our girls to differentiate because the Latin book we have been using this year is purple, and well, green=Greek (doesn't it? LOL!)

Because we have been studying Latin for this school year, we knew some of the Latin roots already, but not all. So we used these cards as a review tool. We took them with us to our Classical Conversations Challenge A group and I had the students look at the picture and guess the meaning. Some were easy, as we had already covered them, some took a little more work. Then we brought the cards home and placed them around the house. 

The girls wanted to place ALL 60 cards, but I think I limited them to the 25 that were easiest to find a match for. (By this time they had been through the set several times, so they were working on reinforcement, not first time learning.) The set comes with an additional card that lists all the meanings and gives an English word or two that is derived from the root. 

In our family, we used the root cards to help us think of all the words we could that used that root. For some roots we only thought of a few, but on others, like 'poly' we came up with quite a few...polygon, polynomial, and polynucleotides. Our girls are in 7th and 9th grade, so our vocab words are a little bigger than yours may be. Might I suggest you consider investing in a set yourself if you have a High School aged student, as they do wonders for helping them decode those standardized testing vocab words!

For a classroom or Co-op teacher, these are invaluable. For a home educator, it might be a special treat, or something you plan ahead for. Other sets were reviewed by Crew members as well. If you click on the link below, it will take you to the other reviews. One I think many of you will be interested in is the "Science Vocabulary Pictures" set.

My final thoughts? Plan ahead. If you have a student who needs the unusual or visual clue, these are phenominal. If your student just gets easily bored, there are many games and activities you can do with these cards to change up your routine. You can see all of the Get the Picture cards at Lone Star's website: http://store.lonestarlearning.com
If your child is still small, look at the Kindergarten cards, they have some great ones!