Is the Twilight series good for your teen's vocabulary?

The_Stir

Is your teenager unable to resist the allure of Edward Cullen'smyriad charms - his ocher eyes and tousled hair, the cadence of his speech, his chiseled alabaster skin, and his gratuitous charm? (I know I am; I just started the third book in the Twilight series haha!)

Well, Brian Leaf, teacher and author of the books Defining Twilight and Defining New Moon, has actually found a way for your teen to improve her/his vocabulary using the Twilight books.

Defining New Moon

"Tons of my students recommended that I read Twilight," says Leaf. "So I picked it up, started reading it, and I was immediately shocked by how many really great SAT, ACT, GED, SSAT standardized test vocabulary words there were in the book. It's kind of amazing."

So Leaf put together two new Twilight series study guides for mastering these vocabulary words. Teens can use these workbooks side-by-side with their own copies of Twilight and New Moon to learn vocabulary words based on their context - learn more than 600 vocabulary words in just the first novel of Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular vampire-romance series!

Here's how teen can use these unique guides:

  • Open your own copy of Twilight or New Moon.

  • Refer to the page where each vocabulary word appears.

  • Read the word in context and come up with a definition.

  • Then check your definitions against those provided in the workbook, make corrections, and complete the drills!

Your teens can acquire vocabulary skills; learn synonyms, word parts, and memorization tools; and get drills and quizzes to integrate what they've learned.

Author Brian Leaf says, "One of the things I love to do is to help kids learn new vocabulary from things that are already around them." Using the already-popular Twilight series and these study guides, young adult readers can learn words in context. According to Leaf, "One of the greatest skills that you can acquire is to actually be able to learn a word from the words around it."

Here's a peek inside Defining Twilight.

Sounds pretty awesome! Sneaking off now to surreptitiously read Eclipse, if only I can evade the needs of my omnipresent offspring.

Written by Sheri Reed for CafeMom's Big Kid Buzz