Ready to Teach - Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to Me!) Review

Do you know where your words come from?  How does knowing the origin of our vocabulary going to help me or my kids?  We recently had the opportunity to find this out.  We were given a copy of Greek Morphemes Lessons from Ready to Teach to review.

Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to Me!) ($69.95) is written for grades middle school through high school.  We were given the Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's Not Greek to Me!) Student book and Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's Not Greek to Me!) Instructor's Manual.  Included in the Instructor's Manual is a cd-rom that is full of interactive review lessons for each group of words.

 Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to Me!) Student book contains twelve lessons that build on top of each other.  It gives students (and adults) the ability to decode words by teaching them just a little bit of Greek.  Yes, I said Greek.  The small word parts or Morphemes, allow you to decode words you may not understand.  40% of the English language after all comes from the Greek.  When you know the meanings of small words, you can easily understand the larger ones.

An example in the book:

Microarchaegynophobiac
Look for words you know....
MICRO - deals with small
ARCHAEologist studies historical items
GYNocologist is a doctor who specializes in the treatment of women
PHOBIA is a fear of something so a PHOBIAC would be a person with this fear

Put all the information together and you have a person who is afraid of little old ladies.

Each lesson gives you between 19-21 prefixes, root words and suffixes to learn about.  The lessons are broken down into daily assignments, and the materials for students to create flashcards is even included in the workbook.  Each lesson is so laid out and explained that even myself, someone who does not really speak another language anymore (the old addage if you don't use it, you'll lose it applies to me) was easily able to pick up on how to teach this to our children.  Actually a child could easily work their way through this program independently it is so well written.

The Instructors manual contains suggested schedule on how to help your child plan out their week while going through this material.  It also contains the tests and answers for the tests and student textbook.  In the back are pre-made flashcards for those students who use flashcards.

How did we use Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to Me!)?

I attempted to use the Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to Me!) with Joey.  Joey has a pretty extensive vocabulary, but we can all improve.  And decoding is not a strong skill for Joey.  So we started going through lesson 1, and I realized right away that he would not be able to tackle a full lesson each week.  So I quickly, and easily was able to adapt down the schedule to make it better for him.  He started tackling fewer words each week.  So what a typical student might do in a week, Joey tackled over a couple week period, sometimes over 3 weeks.  I liked that I was easily able to adjust this program down to a level Joey could work at.  Many programs do not allow this kind of flexibility.  Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to Me!) earns high ratings from me because of this.

He spends roughly 20 minutes looking over his review words and copying the "word parts" or creating sentences.  Joey works on this 2-3 days a week due to his schooling schedule, which is another reason I LOVE the flexibility of the program.

I was curious how the younger kids would do.  So during our poetry tea time, I have been dropping some of the easier "word parts" or "morphemes" at the kids.  I was surprised to see how well they are picking it up.  In fact, the last museum we went to in DC, Joey recognized "morphemes" in a scientific word and was able to guess what it meant.  So it means that the information that he is  learning through Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to Me!) is sticking around in his brain.  

I highly recommend this program for any and all students, especially anyone who is prepping for the SAT or getting ready for college.  Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to Me!) has shown me how much students can learn in a short amount of time.  I believe we will be graduating onto the Latin program when we have finished with the Greek Morphemes.

Several members of the Schoolhouse Review Crew were given the opportunity to try out Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to Me!) from Ready to Teach.  See how it worked for them in their homes by visiting the Review Crew Blog.