Last week, Homeschooling Today endorsed both Vocabulary.com and our sister site the Visual Thesaurus as tools "every home-educating parent" can use to "understand and teach language in new and interesting ways...better than any other resources I have found." We're glad Homeschooling Today focused attention on how well Vocabulary.com can work in a homeschooling environment. Here's why we think it's a great match:

There is no grade-level, just "you"-level

Everyone comes to vocabulary instruction with a personal fingerprint of words they know and words they don't; and none more so than homeschoolers who have been given the freedom to explore areas of learning that interest them.

The Vocabulary.com Challenge embraces this diversity. From the first few questions you answer, the game builds a model of what you know and what you're ready to learn. Then it continues to adjust the pacing and difficulty of the questions you are seeing based on how you're performing. This capacity for individualized attention allows the game to push a student to work a little harder and in more effective ways. It’s also the reason the Challenge is fun; you're never bored by answering questions that are too easy or too hard.

Kids set the pace for learning

As one homeschooling parent put it to us in a recent conversation about Vocabulary.com, "The beauty of homeschooling is that you find the rhythm of your child. When he wants to learn something, he's on it. I just supply the resources."

While teachers in mainstream schools struggle to make time for vocabulary learning in the classroom, relying for the most part on independent reading, homeschooling families have the freedom to use a resource like Vocabulary.com to allow children to pursue vocabulary learning at their own pace, and thereby enhance their independent reading. Depending upon their temperament, one child may want to play for hours at a sitting while another may prefer shorter intervals at regular times. Some kids might pass through a phase where they master hundreds of new words in a month, then take a break, letting that new word knowledge take their reading to the next level.

A homeschooling student can go deeper

Curious about language? The Challenge serves as a gateway to the rich word-learning resources of the Vocabulary.com Dictionary. Beyond definitions, we supply friendly explanations for each word, word family diagrams, synonyms, antonyms, usage examples, and more. And with our Vocabulary Lists feature, students can make lists of words and then learn them in the same way they would if they were playing the Challenge. (For more, watch our short Dictionary Refresher or Making Interactive Vocabulary Lists videos.) 

Gentle (and free) preparation for standardized tests

Getting ready to take the SAT or other standardized test? The Challenge will help kids learn the words most likely to appear on the exam, and it also will get homeschoolers in particular acclimated to the kind of question types they'll see on the exam. (Read more about this here.)

Most important, it's fun!

Like teen fan M00ncat9, kids like learning vocabulary with Vocabulary.com: