Let’s face it. We live in a world today that finds meaning to be — shall we say – meaningless. The “see and say” crowd see meaning of words from the perspective that the child brings to words his own personal meaning, thereby playing into the hands of the same relativism and tolerance that I believe has virtually turned our society and its morals upside down.

On the other hand, those many who now sell phonics, in every shape and color and price, help children to learn to sound out most words just fine, however, this method leads the children to no greater understanding of a word’s meaning than does sight-reading.

In the several years my wife and I spent teaching our children at home, we kept the definition that states, “It is only education if you learned something that you did not know before you started.” We tried, as time went by, to cut out of our homeschool those things that did not fit that definition.

Yes. We did teach our children to learn to read by the phonics method. We taught them phonics the way they did in the colonial days — using Scripture. But, if you phonics patriots would allow me a small infraction about what seems to be as sacred to some as the King James Bible today, we taught a bit of sight-reading also. That is, we taught them to recognize certain words that just somehow did not follow the consigned set of rules set down by phonics. Let me give you an example. Rules of vowel-consonant relationships in the phonics world teach that when at the end of a word the letter “e” follows a consonant, a vowel preceding that consonant shall have a long sound and that ending “e” shall be silent. This is a good and reliable rule in most cases; however, there are exceptions. And, what do you do with these exceptions? You have the child memorize these exceptions by “sight.” I found the same thing when I learned Spanish. There were the steadfast grammatical rules, and then there were exceptions. So you see, neither of these methods is fool proof. It might be said there is a proper time and place for the use of each.

Just as we find a deficit in those two methods, wherein they need each other, there is a bigger deficit in both methods that I wish to reveal. This deficit is that neither of these methods provides necessary instruction, for the most part, about word meaning. This bothers me, because when a child cannot understand the meaning of the words he is reading, he is not being educated. If it is supposed that he is to bring meaning to the words he reads, then the book becomes him instead of his learning from the book. Of what good use is this? There is no education there. Life is more than just an experience. A child can experience a book with pictures, but words are supposed to bring a greater dimension to his learning. If words did not have meaning there would be no use for dictionaries, but words do have meaning. These words mean something to each book’s author, and each author had the intention of conveying that meaning to the reader using those words. It would be a travesty for a child to ignore the author’s meaning and replace it with his own.

An ingenious device that has been introduced into our language is that of “root” meaning. This is an important key to understanding and to true education in reading. “Root” meaning brings to both phonics and sight-reading all the elements of reading and comprehension. A “root” is essentially that part of a word that is left when you remove the suffix and the prefix from a word. This part of the word tells the meaning in its Latin or Greek form. Most dictionaries derive word meanings from this root. Teaching your child root words will greatly enhance their self-comprehension of words. Your child will no longer ask you, “What does this word mean?” He will no longer struggle with how to pronounce words. A word will not stump him when you are not around. He will be a challenge to most students and adults in spelling.

There is a whole host of benefits in teaching your children root words, but unless you put root meaning into practice, and do it the correct way, it will not work for them. Real useful for putting roots to work would be to have or develop a list or chart of root words and their meanings. There are many ways to accomplish this, however, one of the simplest ways is to obtain a good root word dictionary. There are tools such as some common dictionaries as well as the Strong’s Concordance, for Greek roots, that are also good for this purpose.

Since root meaning is neither a method of bringing words to their meaning nor a means of concentration on pronouncing words alone, the goal is to learn roots so well that no word will be either a mystery or a challenge for your children. Unlike many word forms in the English language, root pronunciation is delineated very precisely within root word dictionaries. There is therefore no difference or question about the correct pronunciation of each root.

Looking in a root word dictionary at the word “precept,” we learned that it includes the root “capere,” the Latin verb meaning “to take.” When we added the prefix “pre,” which is the Latin word “prae” meaning “before” or “in front of,” we determined that a “precept” is a rule or principle that one takes in before doing something. Once our students began to remember that “cept” in a word, from capere, means “to take,” then it became simple to know the meaning of other words such as the word “concept.” Here the word “con” means “with.” So the word “concept” was quickly recognized to mean “to take along with.” Another example using Greek roots, was the word “philosophy.” The root word “philos” means “to love” or “love of.” The root “sophos,” derived from the name of the Greek philosopher Socrates, means “wisdom or knowledge.” Together these words form the meaning “the love of knowledge.”

Adding root word study to the beauty of phonics (and sometimes “see say”), instead of having to go to the dictionary to figure out the meaning to words they read, your children will be able to determine what words mean almost instantly. Their level of comprehension will become, to say the least, remarkable. Why not give your children a valuable gift by helping them cultivate the real root of reading.