ABSTRACT
Encourage browsing Carefully chosen place names add detail and also texture and mood to a story. Encourage pupils to browse dictionaries of place names. There are many good dictionaries of place names available, one of the best I’ve found being the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names, though some pupils might find it tough going. Browsing such a rich resource however can make for a rewarding and enjoyable experience: pupils are usually interested in finding out what the name of their city, town or village actually means. In the process they pick up etymological snippets about place names in general. You can focus and extend such knowledge by showing the class some common elements of place names – bare, barrow, borough meaning grove or wood (or from a different root, hill or mound): beck meaning stream: clough meaning ravine or deep valley: ham meaning enclosure, and so on. Put up a list of such elements and encourage pupils to add prefixes, suffixes, adjectives and verbs as they experiment their way towards names they can use:
Oakbarrow, Winterborough, Steepclough, Clough Deeps, Greenburn, Rickety Bridge, Tumblebrook, Lost Creech, Darkdean, Far Fen, Redfleet, etc.
