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Our English department is currently searching for a school-wide (grades 9-12) vocabulary program that emphasizes roots and derivatives. If anyone has titles that they like, please let me know. Thanks.

Sadler -Oxford has a great program with levels A - E. It has roots, derivatives, sentence usage, definitions, as well as synonynm - antonym drills. I've used them for years and prefer their program because of the many levels. It's titled Vocabulary Workshop.

I like Preswick House's Latin and Greek Roots: A Study of Word Families.  I've got levels I-IV that I use for SAT prep and they work well for my struggling students.  The books give the meaning of the roots as well as related vocabulary words.  After we've worked twenty roots, I have kids go on a search through the literature we are reading to find words using those roots.

Holt Rinehart Winston has a good workbook called Vocabulary Workshop. It covers word origins and stresses analogies.

I like to use the Illustrated Word Smart by the Princeton Review.  It helps kids put into cartoon pictures the word--visualizing it and making it more permanently in their visual brains.

In reply to #3: As a matter of fact, that exact program is one that I just requested a review copy of from the publisher. I looked at some sample pages on their Web site and it looked very promising. This is good news! Thank you.

In reply to #1: HRW is great for vocabulary development, but use it in tandem with Amsco's Vocabulary for the College-Bound Student. The second reinforces the first with Latin and Greek prefixes, suffixes and roots. That way you are reinforcing what HRW's vocabulary program offers but does not emphasize.

In reply to #4: In tandem with Amsco's Vocabulary for the College-Bound Student, it's great, but HRW doesn't emphasize the Latin/Greek roots, suffixes and prefixes.  I does, however, give great advice on context clues.

In reply to #1:  ther is a school called the tri county volcational high school u should check it out it will help u

#5, that resource is a great one for visual learners, but I also find it patronizing to older students.

In the past when I've used it, they look at me like I'm crazy and roll their eyes a lot.

They do however learn the words.