Flash Card Time!
Learning new words for the verbal portion of the SAT can be a drag, especially when you’re in the P section and run across lengthy words like prevaricate which, let’s be honest, does not seem like it should be a real word. However, I’m an English nerd, so it’s appropriate that I’d find a way to make verbal SAT prep into a fun game. Below are three tricks I use to make learning vocabulary for the SAT a little more fun.
1. Choose 10 new words every week and try to use them in conversation.
There’s nothing more fun than telling your mother, “Stop hurling invectives at me!” Not only will it help you learn that “invective” means insult or criticism, but it will force your antagonizer to slow down and think about their own SAT verbal knowledge (or lack thereof).
2. Get down to your roots—your Latin roots, that is.
And no, I don’t mean learn Latin dancing. It turns out that many English words stem from Latin, which is an exciting language specifically because it is so predictable and boring. You see, Latin has prefixes and suffixes that can be attached to almost any word and always mean the same thing. Pre always means before (and prefixes come at the beginning of the sentence, before the root). Knowing that pre means before, the word “precipitate” suddenly seems less scary; after all, now you know that half the word means before.
3. Verbal Memory
Have you ever played memory? Here’s a quick rule refresher:
THE RULES FOR PLAYING “MEMORY”
- Mix up the cards.
- Lay them in rows, face down.
- Turn over any two cards.
- If the two cards match, keep them.
- If they don’t match, turn them back over.
- Remember what was on each card and where it was.
- Watch and remember during the other player’s turn.
- The game is over when all the cards have been matched.
- The player with the most matches wins. [Excerpted from http://www.eduplace.com/ss/act/rules.html]
Verbal SAT Memory is just like the memory game, but instead of of playing cards the player writes down the word on one card and the definition on the other card. The object of the game is to match the word with the definition. It’s surprisingly fun!
You can download our FREE printable SAT memory game here. Just print out the sheet, cut out each square, and let the games begin!
The Boarding School Blog 