Help With Meaning Part II - by Dave Marks
In the last essay I listed and gave examples of exercises that you could use with your young readers to help them better understand what they read. They were meant to increase the meaning of prose for them. This essay continues with additional exercises meant for older readers.
MEANING
To the very young beginning reader, any word seems like it must mean a specific thing, but we know that most words have a variety of meanings, depending on how and in what context they’re used. It will help your reader if you work together, and three or four times a week, you list all of the meanings you can think of and find for a word. If you were to do this, it wouldn’t take long before your student had a much better understanding of the complexity to be found in word meanings and had a much expanded vocabulary.
I still do this even after reading three to four books a week for thirty years. I find new meanings and shades of meaning to many words I thought I knew well. A good dictionary and an encyclopedia will help.
As an example or model for this exercise, let’s examine the word plate. To a young child it might have just one meaning; it’s what we eat our food from, and sometimes, when we go on a picnic, the plate is paper. This exercise will force you both to examine the meanings of words.
A plate can mean many things: clutch plate, as in a car; collection plate, as in church; book plate as in publishing; page plate, as in printing; gold or silver plate, as in jewelry; electro-plate, as in manufacturing; home plate, as in baseball; blue plate special, as in a diner; plate-full, as in being very busy; what’s on the plate, as in a business meeting; a plate, as in a whole course of food at dinner; plate, as a horizontal timber laid on a foundation to receive the wall; plate of beef, as in a thin slice of brisket; plating, as in paper making to give high gloss; plate, as in any sheet of metal. Wow! Such a variety of meanings has to give any young reader an expanded image of the meaning of this word.Now it may make more sense to you to think about reading as an act of interpretation. We understand when we read, as will your young reader, in relationship to what is brought to the page. If a child’s understanding of the word plate is limited to that from which we eat our food, then much of the meaning in some writing may be lost.
When you first begin this exercise, you will have to be directive (decide what words to examine and how this is to be done), but soon your reader will want to help you select words. This can turn out to be a word treasure hunt. Have fun with it. I still do.
PART/WHOLE RELATIONSHIP
Your student will have to understand the relationships that words have, describe or establish. Some words describe a part of another word which describes an object. You should have fun working on this exercise.
The point is to give your reader practice understanding the relationships between parts and wholes. You give the two words, and your reader tells you their relationship.
1. motor – car: A motor is part of a car, so this relationship is part to whole.
2. car–bus: A car is a whole and bus is a whole, so this relationship is whole to whole.
3. motor – tire: A motor is a part of a car and a tire is part of a car, so this relationship is part to part. This can get confusing, and you should not let your reader get stuck in details unless that is fun. For instance, piston is part and motor is whole, so that in some situations, motor is part and in others it’s whole.
To do this exercise you have to name only the objects or their relationships, and your reader can complete the exercise by naming either the relationships or the objects. Of course, if you were to name the relationships and were to ask your reader to name the objects, you would have to name a category for the objects. This would work like this: “I’ll name a category and you, Johnny, will name the objects. Remember, I have to tell you if the relationship is part to part, whole to whole or part to whole. You’ll have to tell me the names of two objects that have that relationship.”
“The category for this first game is car and the relationship is part to part. What are the objects?”
“Motor and tire.” (This could have been any two parts.)
“Good for you. Now I’ll name two objects and you’re to tell me the relationship. Pan and kettle.”
“Whole to whole.”
“How about pan and lid?”
“Whole to part.”
“Right! and what if the category is animal and the relationship is whole to whole?”
“Cat and chicken.”
If your young reader doesn’t understand the rules for this game/exercise, wait for six months and try again. It’s better to wait a bit than to frustrate. Keep in mind that this has to be fun.
RECOGNIZING RELATED WORDS
Words are related in different ways. They may have similar characteristics, like a rake and a shovel – they both have long handles. They may be used for similar jobs, like a comb and a brush. They might be associated because of what they represent, like cooking and dinner.
Make a list of words followed by four or five other words, and your young reader is to tell you which of the following words is in some way related to the first word. This looks like this:
1. car – swing, football, bus, table, dog
2. nest – ticket, bed, dinner, home, hammer
3. bird – snow, feet, worm, horse, phone
If in number two your reader were to say nest is like bed, then your reader has created a category that includes both bed and nest. For baby birds and children, this is a logical category. If your reader were to make the category to include all birds and all people, then nest and home would be in the same category.
You must not be too quick in judgment, for that could stifle creative thinking. If there is any logic at all to the categorization, then that is the kind of thinking about words you’re trying to promote.
SYNONYMS
Another way to teach meaning is to have your young reader identify whether objects have similar meanings or if the meanings are different. You are to list orally or on paper a group of objects, and your young reader is to identify whether they are similar or not. This works like this:
“Johnny, I’m going to give you two words. You’re to tell me if the words mean the same thing to you or not. Remember, there is no way you can be wrong in this because I asked you to tell me what they mean to you. If you tell me what they mean to you, you have to be right.”
“Here we go. Close and near.”
“They’re the same.”
“Good. How about apple and peach?”
“They’re the same and different.”
“How could that be?”
They’re both fruit but different kinds.”
“Okay, good for you, Couple and pair.”
“The same, but there might be a problem with that answer.”
“How?”
“Pair to me means that the two things are related, like a pair of shoes or a pair of socks. In this case the two shoes or socks belong together. But couple could be two things that have no relationship at all. Like a couple of kids went swimming. But, sometimes a man and wife are called a couple, and they’re related.”
“Such excellent thinking on your part! Money and pay?
“They’re different, but not always.”
“What?”
“Dad talks about getting his pay and that’s the same as money.”
You can see the reader thinking here. With some practice you both can learn a good deal about the relationships that some words can have.
SYNTAX
Now it gets complicated for the young reader Words mean different things when they are in combination with other words. The combination brings t mind images (connotations) that are different for different people. Even though there are general (cultural) connotations for words, each of us has developed our own particular and personal connotations dependent upon our experiences, and these feelings about words, when they are influenced by the context of their use, give us our various understandings about what authors have in mind.
To help you understand how words in combination with other words take on different meanings, examine with me the words old man. Think of the situations and the ways to describe an old man, giving these two words very different connotations and thus giving us different feelings about them.
There is the description of grandpa as a nice old man. There is old man Christmas. There is the dirty old man. There is old man time. Death sometimes is referred to as the old man. A tennis player at twenty-six is often considered an old man. A boxer is an old man at thirty. In the 1960s a man over thirty was considered to be an old man. There are kind, nasty, bearded, tired, lonely, homeless old men. Each of these bring to mind experiences we have had with the concept. The words that surround old man dictate how we feel about the old man in question and give different meanings to different people.
To help your student with this concept you might create a situation and then describe it so it establishes the meaning for the agreed upon words. To use words like old man you might create the situation (surrounding words) and have your student describe what the words old man in that situation mean. Your student will want to change roles with you in this exercise.
Another example that might help is the two words near and far. In understanding what these words mean it’s important to know their syntactic situations. Think of how confusing the following could be to a young reader. The kitten crawled far from its mother. The moon is near Earth. It’s far to the sun. All of the stars in our galaxy are near each other. It’s too far to ride your bike to the store. The store is too near for Dad to take the car. Germany is far from here. Summer is near.
WORD ORDER
The order of words in an English sentence creates some of the meaning of the sentence. If the order of some words is changed, or even only the placement of one word, the meaning of the sentence changes. It will help your reader to get meaning from sentences if you do this exercise. You write/speak a sentence and have your reader change the placement of the words. See how many different ways the words can be put in the sentence and still have it make sense. This works this way:
After dinner the spider ate the small fly.
1. After the spider dinner, the small fly ate.
2. The spider ate dinner after the small fly.
3. After the dinner, Small, the fly, ate Spider. (cheat?)
4. The spider ate the small fly after dinner.
5. The fly dinner the small spider ate after. (It makes sense to me.)
6. The spider ate after the small fly dinner.
7. The dinner ate spider after the small fly. (Not even me!)
Another exercise having to do with order is one where only one word is changed. The following example makes this clear.
You create the sentence and your reader changes the order of the one word as many times as is possible but still must make sense with the sentence:
Only John went to the store.
John only went to the store.
John went only to the store.
John went to the only store
John went to the store only.
(Weak, but okay.)
John went to only the store.
(I don’t talk this way.)
I remember with fondness, but also a great feeling of loss, working with my son with these same exercises. We both laughed a lot as we enjoyed the experience. I don’t know if he remembers, but I’m sure he doesn’t feel the emptiness I do. When you work with your children, cherish the experience, for there will come a day when you can’t spend such wonderful time together any more, and then you too will feel the loss.
Visit Dave Marks’ web site:
http://www.writingstrands.com for more
information about his programs.
