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Important Food For Your Brain!

We all know there are categories of foods we should eat that benefit our bodies the most, right? Well, there are also categories for proper brain development: Roots & Fruits. No, I'm not actually talking about eating root vegetables and healthful fruits for proper brain development, but rather a vocabulary curriculum (stay with me, here) created by Educational Diagnostic Prescriptive Services (EduDPS).

Roots & Fruits is an amazing vocabulary program that I received free as a member of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine's Homeschool Crew. I have to tell you, I am learning right along with my children - because even though I had a great education (and have no shortage of words), there is so much to this program that I never even knew we could learn!

Okay, so let me break this down for you so you can truly appreciate what I am talking about. You know those programs that you can use to learn "a word a day" - calendars, websites, etc...? This curriculum actually goes WAY beyond learning a word - it teaches you the root of the words first, which maybe isn't so incredibly novel to some, but here is what I find quite unique: it teaches you the actual root word, not the list of vocabulary words of which you have to learn the root. Did that make sense? So instead of learning the words "apathy" or "atheist" and learning about the root word "a," you are taught the root word "a," it's meaning, and the examples, "apathy" and "atheist," which you then define with a dictionary on Day 1. Then, at the end of the week's various lessons to help cement the root word for you, there are mastery games to play to make sure you know the material - while having fun!

Roots & Fruits is also labeled for younger children so that educators like me with children in upper elementary grades as well as lower elementary grades can help differentiate which words to teach the younger children. I just can't wait to get through the whole list!

To see what my fellow TOS Homeschool Crew Members thought of the programs by Educational Diagnostic Prescriptive Services, click here.

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