Lyrical Vocab

“She amorously gazed at him, and surmised that she was inevitably enamored.”

Would that sentence make sense to your teen? Do you even understand it? With help from Vocab Rock: Musical Prep for the SAT and ACT or Vocabulary Accelerator: Music-Driven Literacy Tools for School/Test/SAT Prep, your child will be singing sentences like that all around the house. And better yet, she'll understand them.

Both Vocab Rock and Vocabulary Accelerator include a test preparation workbook as well as a music CD. The hook here is that the CD has vocabulary words woven into the lyrics. Teens can rock out to lyrics like "You are standing next to me, and at this proximity, you are deleterious". After listening to the music, they crack open the workbook and answer test prep questions. Grammy material? Okay, maybe not. But the idea is that the tunes can help with necessary evils such as synonym matching.

These songs may never hit the Top Twenty, but they have a good beat. There are songs for the rocker, the rapper, and even a few with a little soul. But the best news it that after listening carefully to the lyrics, your teen may understand some of the words in other contexts. And if not, there's always a list of definitions.

Although it's doubtful that you can sneak these songs in along with your teens' music collection without them noticing, it definitely one of the faster and more entertaining ways to learn vocabulary.

Vocabulary Rock $17 (Thomson Peterson's, 2004) is available at bookstores nationwide. Vocabulary Accelerator (Defined Mind, 2006), which is mostly used in schools, can be ordered online at www.defmind.com.