Primary 5 Vocabulary List

Primary 5 Vocabulary List is a legacy eduKateSG learning page with a new job. It keeps the original thirty-word 2017 list, but it no longer treats vocabulary as a collection exercise. For Primary 5 English, useful vocabulary must survive reading comprehension, composition writing, oral discussion, grammar, school work and delayed recall. A student should not merely recognise a word today; the student should be able to retrieve and use it later when the context has changed.

This page is designed for families searching for a Primary 5 vocabulary list, P5 English vocabulary, vocabulary words with meanings and examples, vocabulary for composition and practical Primary 5 English revision. The original words remain—apparel, arid, arrogant, allegiance, beacon, blunder, boycott, boisterous, chronological, clarity, collaborate, commend, composure, concise, cultivate, deluge, deplete, drastic, degrade, eligible, efficient, esteem, exploit, extinct, extract, genre, inept, ignite, innovate and intimidate—but the teaching is rebuilt around meaning, boundaries, collocations, retrieval and transfer.

This is not an official MOE or SEAB word list and it is not a complete guide to Primary 5 vocabulary. For a broader current bank, use Primary 5 English Vocabulary: Top 200 Useful Words, Meanings, Examples and Practice. Use this older URL as a thirty-word depth laboratory: fewer words, more control. The complete learning system sits in the Vocabulary Learning Hub.

What changed from the 2017 page

The first version was a short list followed by more than thirty large photographs from classes, travel and daily life. That reflected an earlier blogging era, but the images now interrupt the learning task and make the page difficult to use as a teaching resource. The historical inline gallery has been removed from the body. The title, URL and original publication date remain unchanged.

The deeper change is conceptual. The 2017 instruction—explain the meaning, practise examples and keep using the word—was directionally sound. The 2026 rebuild makes the mechanism explicit. A word becomes useful when a learner can move from encounter to understanding, from understanding to retrieval, and from retrieval to independent use.

The page therefore does not reward “finishing the list”. It rewards increasing resolution. The student should know what makes arrogant different from confident, why concise does not mean incomplete, when exploit is neutral and when it is negative, and how cultivate can move from farming into figurative language.

Primary 5 is a vocabulary transition year

By Primary 5, English begins to expose weak vocabulary more sharply. Texts can become denser, questions demand more inference, composition requires controlled description rather than isolated “good phrases”, and oral discussion rewards students who can express reasons with enough precision. At the same time, vocabulary becomes more academic. Words such as chronological, concise, eligible and efficient appear naturally in instructions, non-fiction, school discussion and other subjects.

This creates a double requirement. Students need breadth so that unfamiliar passages contain fewer unknown words, but they also need depth so that familiar-looking words are not misunderstood. Breadth without depth creates fragile recognition. Depth without breadth leaves too many gaps. A good Primary 5 vocabulary programme alternates between both.

The thirty words here are useful because they span people, behaviour, environment, social action, thinking and processes. That variety lets the learner practise switching context rather than assuming every word belongs only to composition.

A better definition of “know the word”

I can explain the word in simple language.
I can recognise it in a sentence I have not seen before.
I can identify a nearby word and explain the difference.
I know one or two natural collocations.
I can select the correct word form for the sentence.
I can retrieve the word from a meaning or situation after a delay.
I can use it in my own writing or speaking without forcing it.
I can notice when the word does not fit.

That last ability is often the most revealing. Vocabulary maturity includes restraint. A learner who knows why a word is wrong has begun to understand its boundary.

The original thirty words, reorganised by learning job

A. People, conduct and social judgement

arrogant — showing an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or superiority.
allegiance — loyalty or commitment to a person, group, cause or country.
boisterous — noisy, energetic and lively, sometimes to the point of being difficult to control.
commend — praise formally or strongly for something done well.
composure — calm self-control, especially under pressure.
esteem — respect and admiration; also the state of being regarded highly.
inept — lacking skill or ability in a particular activity.
intimidate — make someone feel frightened, pressured or less confident, often in order to influence behaviour.

B. Communication, order and teamwork

chronological — arranged according to time order.
clarity — the quality of being clear in meaning, thought, appearance or expression.
collaborate — work jointly with others toward a shared output or goal.
concise — brief while still containing what is necessary.
genre — a category of artistic or literary work with shared conventions or features.

C. Change, resources and the natural world

arid — very dry, especially because of little rainfall.
cultivate — prepare and use land for growing; figuratively, develop a quality, relationship or skill.
deluge — a severe flood or a very large overwhelming amount of something.
deplete — use up or greatly reduce a resource or supply.
degrade — reduce in quality, condition, dignity or environmental health.
extinct — no longer existing as a living species, or no longer active in some extended uses.
extract — remove or take out, often from a larger substance, source or body.
ignite — cause to burn or begin burning; figuratively, trigger a strong reaction or process.

D. Decisions, consequences and public action

blunder — a serious or careless mistake, often caused by poor judgement.
boycott — refuse to buy, use or participate as a form of protest or pressure.
drastic — extreme or severe, often describing a major action or change.
eligible — meeting the necessary conditions or rules to be chosen or allowed.
exploit — use a resource or opportunity; it can also mean unfairly use a person or situation for advantage.
innovate — introduce or develop a new method, idea or way of doing something.

E. Objects, efficiency and practical description

apparel — clothing, especially as a collective or commercial term.
beacon — a light, signal or prominent guide; figuratively, something that offers guidance or hope.
efficient — achieving a result with relatively little wasted time, effort or resources.

Word laboratory 1: apparel

Apparel means clothing, but it does not behave exactly like clothes in every context. It is common in retail, business and formal classification: sports apparel, protective apparel, apparel industry. A child writing a narrative about getting dressed would usually choose clothes because it sounds more natural. Learning the word therefore includes register.

Try the contrast: “The shop sells outdoor apparel” sounds ordinary. “I folded my apparel before bed” sounds unusually formal. Both are grammatically possible, but good vocabulary use asks what the situation expects.

Word laboratory 2: arid

Arid describes very dry conditions, especially climates and land. It is more specific than hot. Antarctica contains arid regions despite extreme cold because aridity concerns lack of moisture, not temperature. This makes the word useful across English and Science.

Useful collocations include arid climate, arid region, arid land and semi-arid. A composition writer should avoid using arid merely as a fancy substitute for uncomfortable weather.

Word laboratory 3: arrogant

Arrogant is not the same as confident. Confidence concerns belief in one’s ability or judgement; arrogance involves inflated self-importance or an attitude of superiority. A student who says “I prepared carefully and think I can do well” may be confident. A student who says “Everyone else is too stupid to compete with me” is displaying arrogance.

This boundary matters for characterisation. Writers should show evidence—dismissive speech, refusal to listen, belittling others—before attaching the label.

Word laboratory 4: allegiance

Allegiance names loyalty or commitment, often to a country, leader, institution, cause or group. It is stronger and more formal than ordinary preference. Someone can like a football team without owing it allegiance. In history and civic discussion, the word can describe competing loyalties.

Teach the noun with its common pattern allegiance to. Ask students to distinguish allegiance from friendship, obedience and agreement. A person can disagree with a group on one issue while maintaining allegiance to it.

Word laboratory 5: beacon

A beacon is literally a signal light or device used to guide or warn. Figuratively, a person, place or idea can become “a beacon of hope” or “a beacon for researchers”. The metaphor works because a visible signal helps others orient themselves.

The teaching opportunity is to connect literal and figurative meaning. Students remember figurative vocabulary more reliably when they understand the physical image beneath it.

Word laboratory 6: blunder

Blunder is a notable mistake, often associated with carelessness, confusion or poor judgement. It usually sounds stronger than a tiny error. Misspelling one word in a draft may be an error; sending a private document to the wrong public mailing list could be a blunder.

Ask learners to rank mistake, error and blunder in three scenarios. The goal is not to establish a universal scale but to notice how seriousness and judgement influence word choice.

Word laboratory 7: boycott

To boycott is to refuse to buy, use, attend or participate in something as a deliberate form of protest or pressure. The word contains purpose. Simply forgetting to visit a shop is not a boycott. Choosing not to buy from it because of a public concern may be.

For children, keep examples descriptive and neutral. The language lesson is about the structure of the action: deliberate refusal + target + reason or pressure.

Word laboratory 8: boisterous

Boisterous often describes loud, energetic, exuberant behaviour. The tone depends on context. A boisterous celebration can sound joyful; a boisterous group in a quiet library can sound disruptive. This makes it useful for teaching connotation.

Ask: Is boisterous positive or negative? The best answer is “It depends.” That answer opens a larger lesson: many words carry tendencies rather than fixed emotional labels.

Word laboratory 9: chronological

Chronological means arranged by time. Students meet the idea in history, biographies, procedures and narrative planning. A chronological account begins with earlier events and moves forward; a story can deliberately break chronological order through flashback.

A practical exercise is to give six events out of order and ask the learner to rebuild the chronology. Then ask why a writer might choose not to present events chronologically.

Word laboratory 10: clarity

Clarity is a powerful cross-curricular noun. Writing has clarity when meaning is easy to follow. A diagram has clarity when relationships are visible. An explanation has clarity when the listener can reconstruct the reasoning. Clear does not mean simplistic; a difficult idea can be expressed with clarity.

Students should learn that clarity is an outcome for the receiver, not merely a feeling inside the writer. “I know what I mean” is not enough if the sentence does not carry it.

Word laboratory 11: collaborate

Collaborate means work jointly toward an output, solution or goal. It is more specific than sitting together. Three students who independently answer different worksheets beside one another are in a group but may not be collaborating. Collaboration requires coordination.

The noun is collaboration. Useful collocations include collaborate with, collaborate on, close collaboration and collaborative project.

Word laboratory 12: commend

Commend means praise, often formally or strongly. A teacher may commend a student for honesty. A report may commend a team’s careful preparation. It should not be confused with command, a spelling and sound neighbour with a completely different meaning.

Spelling contrast is useful here because vocabulary knowledge includes accurate recognition. Build a two-column mini-test: commend/praise versus command/order.

Word laboratory 13: composure

Composure is calm self-control, especially in pressure, embarrassment or conflict. It is not the absence of emotion. A frightened person can maintain composure while still feeling fear. This distinction makes the word valuable for nuanced characterisation.

Natural phrases include maintain composure, regain composure, lose composure and remarkable composure. Collocations give the word movement and make it easier to retrieve.

Word laboratory 14: concise

Concise means brief without unnecessary material while still preserving what matters. A one-word answer is not automatically concise if it fails to answer the question. A 120-word explanation can be concise if a shorter version would omit necessary reasoning.

Teach concise together with complete. Good examination writing often requires both. The student’s job is not to make every answer short; it is to make every word earn its place.

Word laboratory 15: cultivate

Cultivate literally refers to preparing and using land for crops. Figuratively, people cultivate habits, skills, relationships and attitudes. The figurative meaning works because growth requires repeated conditions rather than one command.

This is a good morphology-and-metaphor lesson: cultivation, cultivated, cultivator. Ask students which uses are literal and which preserve the idea of deliberate development.

Word laboratory 16: deluge

A deluge can be a severe flood or an overwhelming quantity: a deluge of messages, a deluge of complaints. The figurative use keeps the sense of being flooded. Students should learn that strong words carry scale. Three emails are rarely a deluge unless the writer is joking.

Scale words improve composition when evidence matches intensity. They become melodramatic when the situation does not support them.

Word laboratory 17: deplete

To deplete is to reduce a supply significantly by using or removing it. Resources can be depleted: water reserves, batteries, soil nutrients, savings or energy. The word therefore transfers naturally into Science, geography and everyday life.

Contrast deplete with delete. They sound similar but belong to different semantic systems. Such near-neighbour work prevents fast reading from turning into mistaken recognition.

Word laboratory 18: drastic

Drastic describes an extreme or severe action or change, often taken because ordinary measures seem insufficient. Drastic cut, drastic change, drastic measures and drastic decline are common. The word carries intensity and should be supported by the situation.

Ask the learner to decide which of three responses to a small problem would be drastic. This converts meaning into judgement.

Word laboratory 19: degrade

Degrade has several linked uses. Materials or environments can degrade in quality. A person can be degraded through humiliating treatment. Data or signals can degrade when quality deteriorates. The shared core is loss of quality, condition or standing.

Multiple-meaning teaching is important by Primary 5. Students should stop expecting one definition to fit every sentence unchanged.

Word laboratory 20: eligible

Eligible means meeting required conditions. A child may be eligible for a competition because of age, or a family may be eligible for a programme because stated criteria are met. Eligible does not mean selected. It means allowed to be considered.

This is an excellent boundary pair: eligible versus chosen. Understanding procedural vocabulary helps students read forms, notices and instructions more accurately.

Word laboratory 21: efficient

Efficient describes achieving a result with relatively little waste of time, energy, effort or resources. It is not identical to fast. A fast process that creates many errors may be inefficient because rework consumes time later.

This word supports metacognition. Ask students whether their revision method is merely long or actually efficient. What evidence would show that learning is retained? Vocabulary becomes a tool for thinking about studying.

Word laboratory 22: esteem

Esteem is respect or admiration. Self-esteem refers to a person’s sense of self-worth, while “held in high esteem” refers to how others regard someone. The word is more formal than like.

Students should notice grammar: esteem as a noun is common; esteem also exists as a verb, though it is less frequent in everyday primary writing. Teach the form they are most likely to meet first.

Word laboratory 23: exploit

Exploit is especially useful because context changes its moral tone. To exploit a natural resource can mean use it for benefit. To exploit a vulnerable person means take unfair advantage. A writer must inspect the object of the verb and the surrounding context.

Words with multiple value-laden senses teach an important reading habit: never decide meaning from the word alone when the sentence supplies a more specific use.

Word laboratory 24: extinct

Extinct most commonly describes a species with no living members. It can also describe something no longer active, such as an extinct volcano, though the scientific meanings differ by domain. Students should connect the word to extinction and avoid using it for things that are merely rare.

Rare is not extinct. Endangered is not extinct. This boundary is scientifically and linguistically important.

Word laboratory 25: extract

Extract as a verb means remove or obtain from a source: extract juice, extract information, extract a tooth. As a noun, an extract can be a short passage taken from a longer text. The pronunciation stress can also differ by word class in some English varieties.

Primary learners can use this word to see how one spelling can occupy more than one grammatical role while retaining a shared idea of taking something out.

Word laboratory 26: genre

Genre is a category of creative or communicative work with recognisable conventions: mystery, fantasy, biography, science fiction, comedy and so on. A genre is not a rigid box; works can blend conventions. Still, the category helps readers anticipate what kind of experience or structure may appear.

Teach genre through classification and exceptions. What features make a story feel like a mystery? What happens when a mystery also contains fantasy? Classification becomes a reasoning task.

Word laboratory 27: inept

Inept means lacking skill or ability in a particular task, often conspicuously. It can sound harsh when applied to a person, so students should understand tone and target. “An inept attempt at repairing the pipe” criticises performance; “He is inept” broadens the judgement to the person.

This is a useful ethics-of-language lesson: precise vocabulary includes awareness of how labels affect people.

Word laboratory 28: ignite

Ignite literally means cause to catch fire or begin burning. Figuratively, an event can ignite interest, debate, anger or change. The metaphor works because ignition starts a process that can grow quickly.

Students should distinguish trigger from result. A spark may ignite a fire, but it is not the whole fire. Similarly, a comment may ignite debate without determining every later argument.

Word laboratory 29: innovate

Innovate means introduce or develop a new method, product or approach. It does not simply mean invent something never before imagined. Improvement and recombination can also be innovative when they produce a meaningfully new solution in context.

The related noun innovation is widely used in education, business, science and technology. Ask students to explain what changed and why the change matters before calling something innovative.

Word laboratory 30: intimidate

Intimidate means cause someone to feel frightened, pressured or less confident, often through presence, threat or power. A difficult examination can feel intimidating, but strictly speaking the verb often involves an agent: someone intimidates someone else. The adjective intimidating is broader for situations.

Teach the family together: intimidate, intimidation, intimidating, intimidated. Students then learn to select the grammatical form rather than forcing one form into every sentence.

How to learn the list without turning it into thirty flashcard islands

Group words by relationship and reuse them across contexts. For example, clarity, concise, chronological and genre can form a communication cluster. arid, deplete, degrade, extinct and extract can form an environment-and-resources cluster. arrogant, composure, esteem, intimidate and commend can form a social-behaviour cluster.

The cluster is not meant to imprison the word. It gives the learner an initial neighbourhood. Later, the word must travel. Deplete can move from water supply to battery power. Composure can move from sport to oral examination. Concise can move from writing to spoken explanation.

Transfer is evidence that the vocabulary network is becoming flexible.

The Primary 5 retrieval ladder

Show the word and ask for a meaning.
Show the word and ask for an example.
Give the meaning and ask for the word.
Give a situation and ask the learner to select the word.
Give two near words and ask which is better.
Ask the learner to use the word in a new subject or topic.
Wait several days and repeat without announcing the target list.
Use the word inside authentic reading, composition or oral work.

Each rung removes support. A learner who succeeds only at rung one has recognition. A learner who reaches rung eight has much stronger working command.

Vocabulary and comprehension

Vocabulary affects comprehension in two directions. Unknown words can block literal understanding, but weak semantic precision can also weaken inference even when every word looks familiar. A student who reads arrogant merely as “confident” may misread a character relationship. A student who treats eligible as “selected” may misunderstand an informational text.

When answering comprehension, encourage a three-step habit: locate the evidence, interpret the relevant word or phrase in context, then construct the answer. Vocabulary is not a side exercise; it sits inside evidence interpretation.

Vocabulary and composition

For composition, build from scene evidence to word choice. Do not start with the target word and invent a sentence only to display it. Start with what the character does. If the character checks every small detail, meticulous from another list may fit. If the character stays controlled during an accusation, composure may be useful. If a crowd is loud and energetic, boisterous may sharpen the description.

This direction—evidence to word—is more reliable than word to decoration because it preserves meaning and causality.

Vocabulary and oral

Oral discussion benefits from academic verbs and nouns because they let a learner organise thought. Clarity, collaborate, efficient, innovate and eligible can appear in many school and real-life topics. The student should practise short explanations that sound like natural speech, not memorised essays.

A useful oral challenge is “one precise word, one reason, one example”. The target vocabulary must help the point. If removing the word changes nothing, it may be ornamental.

Vocabulary across subjects

Science: arid, deplete, degrade, extinct, extract, ignite.
Social studies and public life: allegiance, boycott, eligible, exploit.
Mathematics and problem solving: chronological, clarity, concise, efficient.
Project work: collaborate, innovate, brainstorm from related vocabulary networks.
Literature and writing: genre, composure, arrogant, boisterous, beacon as metaphor.

Cross-subject reuse increases the number of retrieval routes. A word encountered in English and then again in Science is less likely to remain an isolated school-list item.

A four-week plan for this thirty-word legacy list

Week 1 — Ten words and clean meanings

Choose ten words. Use short situations, definitions, contrasts and oral examples. End the week with scenario-to-word retrieval rather than spelling alone.

Week 2 — Ten more words and cumulative review

Add ten new words but continue retrieving the first ten. Mix old and new so students must discriminate. Introduce useful word families.

Week 3 — Final ten and transfer

Add the remaining words. Use short passages, composition fragments and oral prompts. Ask students to justify why a word fits.

Week 4 — No new words

Stop collecting. Retest all thirty after delays, repair the weakest boundaries, and require use in tasks that do not look like vocabulary exercises. This consolidation week is where list learning begins turning into English capability.

Ten diagnostic exercises

A desert receives very little rainfall. Choose between arid and drastic and explain why.
A student remains calm after forgetting the first line of a presentation. Which noun fits?
A notice says pupils aged ten to twelve may enter a competition. What word describes pupils who meet the rule?
A paragraph uses 120 words where 70 would communicate the same meaning. Which quality is missing?
A team divides research, compares findings and jointly writes one report. Which verb describes the process?
A company uses a vulnerable worker unfairly for profit. Which verb can describe the action, and why is the tone negative here?
A species has no living members anywhere. Which adjective is precise?
The author moves from a present scene to a childhood memory. Is the narrative fully chronological? Explain.
A small spark causes dry leaves to begin burning. Which verb fits?
A student gives an insulting answer because he assumes he is better than everyone else. Which adjective best captures the attitude?

Answers and what they diagnose

1. Arid tests whether the learner understands dryness rather than severity. 2. Composure tests recognition of calm self-control under pressure. 3. Eligible tests the boundary between meeting conditions and being selected. 4. Concise tests whether brevity is connected to necessary content. 5. Collaborate tests whether shared work is genuinely coordinated.

6. Exploit tests the negative sense of unfair advantage. 7. Extinct tests the boundary with rare or endangered. 8. No; the flashback breaks strict chronological presentation. 9. Ignite tests the literal sense before figurative transfer. 10. Arrogant tests superiority rather than confidence.

A writing exercise: one scene, six vocabulary decisions

Imagine three pupils preparing a school exhibition. One has an arrogant attitude and dismisses the others. Another maintains composure when the display collapses. The group must collaborate to rebuild it. They need a more efficient layout, a concise explanation card and enough clarity that visitors can understand the exhibit without a guide.

Now remove all six target words and rewrite the scene through actions and dialogue. Then restore only the words that genuinely compress a useful idea. This prevents students from assuming vocabulary strength means maximising target-word frequency.

A reading exercise: multiple meanings

Create three short sentences with extract: a dentist extracts a tooth; a student reads an extract from a memoir; a machine extracts oil from seeds. Ask what stays constant across the uses. The underlying relation—taking something from a larger source—helps the learner organise polysemy instead of memorising disconnected definitions.

Do the same with cultivate and ignite. Literal meanings often provide the image that makes figurative meanings easier to understand.

A parent’s low-friction routine

Parents do not need to conduct a second school day at home. Pick two words during dinner or a journey. Ask for one real example and one near miss. A learner may say a crowded party was boisterous; ask whether a quiet but energetic game can also be boisterous. The conversation is short, but the boundary becomes more precise.

If the child is tired, stop before the language becomes punishment. Durable vocabulary depends on repeated encounters over time; one exhausting session rarely compensates for weeks without retrieval.

Common failure modes

Copying definitions without examples.
Using a difficult word simply because it looks impressive.
Treating synonyms as perfectly interchangeable.
Never revisiting older lists after a test.
Practising only recognition and not retrieval.
Ignoring word class and sentence grammar.
Learning one meaning when the word has several common senses.
Keeping vocabulary inside English lessons and never noticing it elsewhere.
Correcting wrong usage without explaining the boundary.
Adding more words when the real problem is weak retention.

What progress should look like

At first, the student may need the printed list. Later, the learner should retrieve from meanings and scenarios. Eventually, the words should appear independently in reading interpretation, oral explanation or writing when they fit. The visible list matters less as the internal network becomes stronger.

This is Learning Continuity applied to vocabulary: the word remains connected across time, representations and contexts. A learner who understood deplete on Monday, identifies it in a Science passage next month and uses it naturally in a discussion has preserved a connection rather than merely passed a quiz.

When to move beyond the list

Move on when most words can be retrieved after delay and used accurately in new contexts. Do not wait for perfect mastery of every rare nuance. The next list should overlap with the old one through reading and application so the previous words keep receiving maintenance.

If many words disappear quickly, do not accelerate. Reduce the new-word load, increase retrieval, strengthen reading exposure and repair the learning loop. More input is not always more learning.

Where this page sits in the deeper eduKateSG website

This page provides focused practice alongside broader vocabulary guides. The Master Vocabulary page provides the broad vocabulary map. How Vocabulary Works explains the mechanism. The Vocabulary Learning Hub provides the school-level routes. The English Learning Hub shows how vocabulary reconnects to reading, writing, speaking and listening.

That structure matters. A deep website should not produce fifty pages that all claim to be the same “best Primary 5 vocabulary list”. It should give each page a reason to exist, then make the route between them obvious.

Frequently asked questions

Is this the complete vocabulary a Primary 5 child needs?

No. It is a thirty-word historical learning set. Primary 5 vocabulary grows through wide reading, school texts, conversation and explicit teaching across many semantic fields.

Should my child memorise all thirty at once?

Usually not. Split the set, retrieve cumulatively and delay review. The number should be adjusted to what the learner can retain and use.

Should spelling be tested?

Yes, spelling matters for written use, but spelling alone is weak evidence of vocabulary mastery. Test meaning, retrieval and context too.

Can these words be used in PSLE composition?

Some can, when the story or task genuinely calls for them. Do not force them into unrelated scenes. Accurate ordinary vocabulary is preferable to impressive misuse.

How do I know whether a word is active vocabulary?

A strong sign is independent retrieval: the learner produces the word from a need or meaning without seeing it in a list first.

What if my child knows meanings but cannot write well?

Writing coordination may be the bottleneck. Vocabulary is one component among idea generation, relevance, sentence control, paragraphing, causality and revision. Route the learner back into the wider English system rather than adding endless lists.

What should we use after this article?

Continue to the current Primary 5 200-word guide, then choose a retrieval, reading or writing route from the Vocabulary Learning Hub based on the actual weakness.

The larger point: a list is an interface, not the learning

A vocabulary list is useful because it gathers possibilities in one place. But the list is not what ultimately matters. The learner needs meaning that can travel. The word clarity should help in English and in explaining Mathematics. Deplete should work in a Science passage and in a discussion of personal energy. Composure should help interpret a character and describe what happens during an oral examination.

That is the difference between owning a page of thirty words and owning thirty new distinctions. One can be photographed, ticked and forgotten. The other becomes part of how a learner reads the world.

Continue learning

For current class availability and location information, use the eduKateSG contact page. This learning article was first published in 2017.