Reply #53: There are plenty, and I have a bunch in my classroom. [View All]

[LWolf]

I also keep collegiate dictionaries. "Grade School" dictionaries don't have as many words. Obviously, since they don't have all those "bad" words, lol. That means that students often can't find more advanced words in the dictionaries for younger people. The latest Webster's Collegiate has 225,000 entries. The Webster's Intermediate, intended for middle school, has 70,000 and doesn't include as much information for each word.

We don't limit vocabulary development because they might run into a "bad" word. The collegiate dictionary provides word origin, which is part of Language Arts curriculum for my 6th - 8th graders. The others don't.

Of course, the print dictionaries are always a last resort, anyway. They'd rather use online dictionaries. We just don't have enough 'puters for all of them to have access whenever they need it.