Robinson Curriculum is a $200 curriculum that provides printable public domain books and vocabulary cards. Two of my children used Robinson for over a year, starting at ages six and eight. However, we found this curriculum to have some serious deficits, and the vocabulary is especially poor. Why?
1) Robinson provides no "electronic" list of the vocabulary words in his curriculum. The words remain trapped in his software program in card format, and so the only way to compare them to SAT lists to see what you might be missing is to type them out, one by one. This took me weeks of work.
2) Robinson's vocab list has 6464 words, but these words are quite random in their selection. I compared Robinson's list to several well-known 5000 word SAT study lists, and unbelievably Robinson has only 2300 word matches with a standard 5000 word SAT list. Less than half!
3) Robinson's definitions and sentences for each word are often long and tedious, and thus very difficult for lower grade levels to pronounce. I therefore had to listen to my children study vocabulary every day merely to ensure my kids were pronouncing everything right.
4) Robinson's definitions and sentences are usually longer than is necessary, making them very difficult to memorize. The student gains nothing from memorizing more than he needs to. When memorizing over six thousand words, the student needs all the help he can get!
5) Vocabulary cards should have both sentences and definitions on the back of a single card. Robinson has this option, but when printed this way he provides only four cards per page, with no 'cut lines' on these pages. Robinson's standard cards (with individual sentence/definition) have cut lines and provide a reasonable 10 words/page, but who wants to memorize off two sets of cards? This is nearly twice the time required.
6) Many of Robinson's words are simply too basic to require memorization; remember, he includes 2700 words that are not even on standard SAT lists, words like amuse and anxiety. Young readers pick these words up on their own. Why should they memorize things they will learn anyway?
So how does Core compare?
• Nearly all 7500 words are potential SAT fodder.
• Words are organized by word length to become progressively more difficult
• Audio files allow for the student to gain proper pronunciation and accent
• Audio files allow for independent work with no teacher input
• Sentences and definitions are shorter and thus easier to memorize