Dictionary Skills Worksheet

Would this word be on this page?

Every problem is the same shape. Two guide words, one target, circle yes or no. Given a page running from marble to margin, would march be on it?

Answering means comparing at the third or fourth letter rather than the first. March falls between them because c comes after b and before g, and the first three letters are identical in all three words. That is the whole skill, and it is considerably finer-grained than the alphabet work most children arrive with.

Worth saying out loud to a class: this is a search skill, not a vocabulary one. You can decide whether a word is on a page without having the faintest idea what it means, and separating those two things makes the task much clearer.

The sub-skills children skip

Alphabetical order looks like one skill and is several. Nearly all the difficulty sits in the later ones.

• First letter. Secure in most children long before any dictionary work begins, which is why it gets mistaken for the whole skill.
• Second letter. Cat before cot. The first real step up, and where a child who chants the alphabet rather than knowing it begins to come unstuck.
• Third and fourth letter. Stream, street, strength. This is the level guide words actually demand.
• Shorter word first. Car before card.
• Identical prefixes. The un- words fill pages, so every comparison happens deep inside the word.

Diagnose before you practise. Hand over ten words to sort and watch where the errors start. It is almost always the second or third letter, and that is the level to work at.

A teaching sequence beyond this sheet

These worksheets do the first and most important of four question types. The other three are worth building towards by hand once this one is secure, and they go in this order:

1. Would it be on this page? Guide words and a target, yes or no. What this generator prints.
2. Which page? Several pages with their guide words; place one word on the right one. Adds a search across options.
3. Sort into a page. Given guide words, pick which of several words belong. Reverses the direction of the reasoning.
4. Supply the guide words. Given a list of entries, write what the guide words would be. Much the hardest, because it requires sorting the whole list first.

Reaching type four is the goal, because it is the one that proves alphabetical ordering is genuinely secure, and not simply recognised on sight.

Does any of this matter with a search box?

A fair question, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a defensive one.

It still matters, for two reasons. The underlying skill is alphabetical searching, which turns up in indexes, glossaries, directories, contact lists and filing systems. And a search box needs you to already know roughly how a word is spelled, whereas a child who cannot quite spell it can still hunt through the sk- pages and find it.

But the case is narrower than it was, and the better move is to teach both together. Use the print dictionary for navigation and the online one for pronunciation and current usage; each does something the other does not.

The persuasive version is a race. Find six words in a printed dictionary and six online. Print is often faster than children expect once the skill is there, and discovering that themselves beats being told it is useful.