The center has a book form of a first Thesaurus. It's useful to go over the introduction to explain what a thesaurus is for and how the information is organized and presented. Children don't usually learn words one by one, they learn them as groups. Work with synonyms and antonyms can help them explore the meanings of words and their relationship to other words.
| Not all words have easy synonyms or antonyms! E.g., what is the antonym of 'hello'?
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| It's useful to point out that synonyms are SIMILAR but not EXACTLY the same.
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| Reinforce learning by asking the child to write something using the word, one or more synonyms and antonym.
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| Remind the child that synonyms are never exact -- there are different shades of learning. If we have two different words for something, we will tend to use them a little bit differently and gradually they will mean something different.
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