reading to kids

I had a very kind and interesting email from Jess:

I started reading ITW to my two children while I was homeschooling them. I loved putting history into a more personal level for both my son and daughter (of course they had to verify the facts found within – good lesson on research,etc., etc.). My son has since gone on to the US Air Force Academy; my daughter is 10th grader in a local high school's IB program.  I continue to read and reread your novels writing down vocabulary words for my daughter to use in her hs papers.  Personally, I've always felt like I have a good reactive vocabulary (once seen in context I'm pretty good at figuring out the meaning) but a very poor proactive one.  Can you tell me what tools, practices, etc. you've used in order to build your vocabulary?  You truly use words as paint and the pictures created are master pieces!

I think this is the first time I've had a question like this, and for the life of me I don't know how to answer it. I have no memory of learning any vocabulary at all, with one exception I'll mention below. Instinct tells me that it has to do with primarily with the fact that I started reading early and I have always read a great deal, but that's not much of an answer, as Jess clearly reads a lot and has read with her kids from the beginning.

The only time I ever looked at a vocabulary list (as far as I can remember) was when I was about to take the GREs — the exams that you take when you're applying to graduate school in some subject other than law or medicine. For some weird reason, the word hirsutism got my attention. It means, so you don't have to look it up, excessive hairiness. I remember thinking that it was a useless word, one of the many words people put on spelling lists just for the hell of it,  but that doesn't get used much.  Which made me curious, so I put "hirsute" and "GRE" into google and what do you know, the first hit is a whole weblog post from a company that offers GRE preparation courses. The weblog is actually quite well done and interesting, so maybe in this round-about way I found at least one suggestion for Tess.

Anybody have any other suggestions for her?