How to Tackle the Vocabulary in the Book

Note: A teacher's edition of reproducible material will also be published eventually (still working on it).

In the Omnia folder is a new folder for Tres Fabulae Horrificae which contains a list of the words used by story and a count of how many times the word is used in each story. There is also a list of the 85 words that are used in all three stories as well.
      It is important that the student reading these stories know most of the words before they begin.  In many instances, the graphic content will provide enough contextual clues particularly for unknown verbs and nouns that students will be able to comprehend the meaning without looking up the words.  However, if there are simply too many unknown words, the students will lose the flow of the action. They can of course look the words up on the back but too much of this slows the reading down to a crawl and the story ceases to be compelling.
     I would suggest that you use these word lists to create your own word list to pre-teach the vocabulary before students read the stories.  Below is a list of activities from the site that can be used to teach words or phrases in the story before students begin reading.  

Stage I:  Learning Unfamiliar Words:
Note;  These activities teach individual words.  The best words to use with these activities are words new to your students that are in heavy rotation in the story.  These activities are in order of things to do first - when students just learned the words to last when they have some familiarity with them.  It is not necessary that you do all of them - pick a few that appeal to you and your students and move on to Stage II.  Clicking on these activities should open up the blog page where the activity is described in a new window.
Flashcard Practice
Vinco
Reverse Pictionary
Slap and Grab
Quid Est?
Flyswatter
Spoons

Stage II: Making Phrases with the New Words:
The next step is to fold the new words into phrases that use other words that you have used before - folding the unfamiliar with the familiar while continuing to review words you may have used in a previous unit but did not get much repetition.  This a  good place to fold in adverbs which are difficult for students to identify as stand alone words but are more easily remembered in a phrase. The following  activities  can be  used to accomplish this.  These activities can be used in any order. 
Stercus
Respondete
Latinum Bellum
Tuxtax

See also accompanying blog about grammar. See post reading activities for some ideas about what to do after the story...