What is the best way to help your child prepare for the challenging vocabulary words on the ISEE and/or SSAT exams?

If your child is not a vocabulary wiz who is familiar with SAT-level words such as flamboyant and garrulous, then the verbal section and parts of the reading comprehension section will most likely be a bit of a challenge. You can help children bring up their verbal score on these exams by helping them to study their prefixes. Both the ISEE and SSAT have a synonym section, which means that students are given a word and must choose the answer choice that means the same, or nearly the same. The problem with synonyms is that there are no clues given because there is no context provided. Children either know the word or they don’t. Unless they are avid readers, they probably will not be familiar with most of the words. The words are hard!

One strategy you can employ is to empower your children by helping them to understand what a prefix is and how prefixes can help them decipher the meaning of a word. Setting up an achievable memorization goal (20 to 30 prefixes per week) is a good way to attack this challenge.

Commonly Seen Prefixes

A – amoral

Anim – animal, animation

Anti – anti-smoking, antisocial, antithesis

Bell – bellicose, belligerent

Bene – benefit, beneficial, benevolent

Chron – chronological, chronicles

Co – cooperate, covalent

Cred – credible, incredible, credulous, incredulous

De – detour

Dem – demographics, democracy

Fid – fidelity, infidelity

Gen – generation

In – incredible, incredulous, infidelity, innocuous

Loqu – loquacious

Magn – magnitude

Mal – malevolent, malicious

Mis – mistake, mishandled

Morph – polymorphism, morphing

Omni – omnipotent, omniscience

Pac – pacify

Pan – panoramic, pandemic

Path – apathy, empathy

Post – postmortem, post-op, postdate,

Pot – potent, despot

Pre – preapprove,  preview, prepare,

Re – redo, reappear

Scrib – scribe, transcribe

Super – superflous, superb, superhuman

Un – undo, unequal

Viv – vivacious, revive

Believe it or not, once students learn about prefixes and how they apply to words and definitions, they usually tend to think that prefixes are “cool.”*

*Cool – The highest honor a tutor can receive is for students to think that standardized test preparation strategies are not only helpful, but also “cool.”