Arrowhead students are becoming more familiar with the concept, “Word of the Week.”

Junior Nina Orlando, who is in a Composition class, says, “I think Word of the Week is becoming a lot more popular. Teachers are talking about the specific words in class and it is really helpful, when it comes to preparing me for the ACT.”

English teacher Terri Carnell says, “For the first two years, the words came from ACT word lists or Common Core word lists. This year, the words correlate with the monthly department themes.  For example, September’s theme was ‘Everyday. On time.’ by the Arrowhead Way Committee, so the words this month relate to being on time.  I also take requests, and we do get them from teachers and community members every so often.”

Each department at Arrowhead chooses a theme for a month and this week’s (12/14/15) word is amalgamate. Amalgamate means “to mix, merge, or combine”, according to Webster’s Dictionary. On the Word of the Week from the Arrowhead website the description, it gave also gives the synonyms of unite, coalesce, and blend. The antonyms they use are disconnect, separate, and disjoin.

There are prizes that students are able to win. “You have a great chance of winning one of these prizes” says the librarian.

The prizes are organized by Carnell. She says, “We wrote a grant last year to cover the cost of prizes.  I generally buy from local businesses like the Picnic Basket, Subway, Culver’s, Hillside Movie Theater, or Jimmy John’s.  We are going to run out of money soon though, so I will need to solicit businesses for donations.”

Students can enter by filling out a red slip in either library or online.  They need to state where and how they heard the word being used or write their own sentence using the word.  There are Word of the Week containers on each circulation desk and the winners and words are posted there each week.

Recent winner of the Word of the Week Abbey Weisrock, senior, said, “It is a super cool experience. I am happy that I won a gift card, I will be able to get a sub sandwich with this.”

There are 36 weeks in a school year, which means there are 36 new words for the students to learn and participate in Word of the Week for.

Some former words of the week were placid, bigot, hamper, and kindle. All of these words can be found on the official SAT and ACT vocabulary lists.

“I think all schools should do a word of the week, it is fun to participate in,” said senior Sam Boler. “I didn’t know that the words were from the official ACT lists, but that is a really good idea and it’s super cool and awesome that the school does that.”

As well as being in the north and south campus libraries and morning announcements, the word of the week can be found on the main page of Arrowhead’s website: www.arrowheadschools.org. Once on the main page, the word of the week is located to the under the “News and Events” title and is abbreviated as “WOW: (insert word here)”.

Click in the link and you’ll see  the word itself, a picture related to the word, the pronunciation of the word, the definition of the word, synonyms for the word, antonyms of the word, and a sentence using the word.