That is the whole method, and it is the one thing a printed workbook can never do — because the workbook was set in type before it met your child.
A baseline per reader.Ten minutes each, and you know where every child in the house actually stands — a defensible number for the portfolio, and a map of their knowledge across 12,000 graded words. Fake words are mixed in, so a generous self-rating costs them.
About the test →
The word list for the book on the table.Choose a title from the
reading room and print the words that stand between your student and the story — graded from Elementary to Advanced, ordered by how much each word matters in that book, each with its Webster's definition and the sentence where the author used it. Assign it the week before you start the book, not after.
A ladder instead of a leap.Nobody hands a ten-year-old Chapman's Homer. Our
ladders measure each rung — Lamb's retelling, then the play; Church, then Bryant, then Chapman — so a child graduates upward when the vocabulary is there. On the Macbeth ladder, 73 of the play's study-worthy words are pre-taught by the retelling. The on-ramp does real work.
Webster's 1828 definitions.
The dictionary your curriculum already trusts — morally serious, beautifully written, quoting the canon your family reads. Webster's 1913 fills the gaps; genuinely modern words get modern entries. Every definition shows its source.
Short sessions that stick.
New words enter a spaced-repetition queue and come back just before they would be forgotten. Ten minutes a day, not another subject block — and the progress is visible, band by band, on one dashboard.
Printable everything.
Every book list and ladder page prints clean, for the table rather than the screen. Progress exports to a file you keep, so nothing lives only in somebody else's cloud.
If your student reads on a Kindle® e-reader, there is a shortcut worth knowing: every word they looked up this term is sitting in one file on the device, each with the sentence from the book. Drag it in and the words they proved they did not know become the words they study — parsed in your browser, never uploaded.
How the import works →
What it replaces, and what it doesn't
It replaces the vocabulary workbook — the static twenty-a-week list bought per grade, per child. It does not replace phonics, spelling instruction, or reading aloud together, and it is not trying to. It is one narrow job done properly: knowing which words each reader has, and handing them the next ones that matter.