The HBJ School Dictionary [antikvár]

TO TEACHERS AND PARENTSAn elementary school dictionary should be both a useful reference book to help children with questions they have about words they encounter in their reading and study, and a textbook with ample material for the study of words and usage in connection with the language arts. The HBJ School Dictionary has been designed to play both roles.It has been freshly constructed, from word list to pictures, maps, and diagrams, and it is up to date. Its most immediately noticeable feature is the use throughout of a second color. In recent years, color has come into use in practically all textbooks and has proved both useful and attractive. Now color has been extended to the dictionary, where it is especially helpful in maps and diagrams.The most important feature is the word list. In building the word list, two steps were taken to correlate more closely the vocabulary covered in the dictionary and the vocabulary of modem textbooks.First, each member of the Board of Curriculum Specialists prepared and recommended a list of words newly used in his or her subject in the elementary grades. Many of the words are by no means new words, but some are new to the elementary grades, brought into use by the educational trend that created the new mathematics and science courses, among others.Second, our staff read scores of textbooks published within the last five or six years and other scores of juvenile bookswidely used today for supplementary or enrichment reading.We have attached more weight to these studies as guides to currency than we have to the excellent but aging word lists, such as The Semantic Count, which were also consulted.The offering of words in each of the subjects of the elementary curriculum is as large as space permits, and is especially large in mathematics and science. Some of these words even as late as ten years ago would very likely have been thought too advanced for the elementary school. Now they are in daily use in textbooks and classroom discussion.As in science and mathematics, new materials and methods are being introduced into language arts courses, whether in the area of traditional grammar, transformational grammar, or some other type based on linguistic study. In line with this trend, we have included features and materials once thought too advanced for the elementary level. They have been very carefully adapted to the understanding of the elementary student, both in the presentation of facts and in the wording. They make up an unusual body of material readily available for various sorts of word studies.Take etymology as an example. The etymologies in a typical college dictionary, showing unknown source words from languages scarcely heard of by the average elementary student, would of course be meaningless at the elementary level.HOW TO 11