Bob Greenman is an award-winning educator who spent 30 years in Brooklyn, New York teaching English and journalism at James Madison and Edward R. Murrow High Schools. Here he recalls how he he used objects encountered in everyday life as the inspiration for enjoyable and effective vocabulary instruction.
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Bob Greenman is an award-winning educator who spent 30 years in Brooklyn, New York teaching English and journalism at James Madison and Edward R. Murrow High Schools. Here he recalls how he he used objects encountered in everyday life as the inspiration for enjoyable and effective vocabulary instruction.
Continue reading...
The U.S. presidential election is six months away, but the Republican debates and primary contests have already gone on for more than a year. The long campaign has meant plenty of exposure to that special genre of language known as political speech.
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Wordshop
Vocab activities for your classroom
Teaching Verbs and Confronting the Skunk
May 15, 2012
By Georgia Scurletis
If "grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts," how can teachers confront the skunk when it comes to explaining how verbs work?
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What keeps writing alive? The truth of life. Getting the truth into words is our only hope for immortality. Writing that speaks falsely about life dwindles down to death in a matter of decades.
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Automatically create lists of vocabulary from any text
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The podcast Lexicon Valley tackles knotty language issues in an engaging manner. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield finish a three-part series on language and gender by looking at the struggles over the absence of a gender-neutral pronoun in English. They talk to University of Michigan professor Anne Curzan about the case for singular "they" to fill the gap. Listen to the podcast here, and catch our own interview with Curzan here.
A holiday has been created out of thin air and promoted by a blogger named Shaun McCance: Passive Voice Day, to be celebrated by one and all today. Appreciation for the passive voice can be shown by using the hashtag #passivevoiceday on Twitter. As has been said by Shaun, "It's just enjoyed when things are taken to an absurd extreme." Attention has been paid from San Francisco to Australia. More can be read here.
Wild Words of Children's Literature, from "Runcible" to "Rumpus"
May 11, 2012
- 4 Comments
Stop the Madness: A Plea for Grammar Laxity
May 8, 2012
- 9 Comments
It's Getting "Meta" All the Time
May 7, 2012
- 5 Comments
Tracking Down the Roots of a "Super" Word
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April 23, 2012
- 7 Comments
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Vocabulary Is Where You Find It
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"Enjoyable suggestions from Mr. Greenman!
I agreed previously that I wait eagerly week wise to read articles from almost all VT writers, Mr. Greenman..."
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yudy S. said,
"itz a great idea!! I plan to plagiarize it when I start teaching!!!"
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Hope I. said,
"That was a very innovative way to teach new words!!
I myself didn't know the meaning of effervescent and after reading your little story I can gather..."
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ThomasK said,
"Thanks for your column. I do think your starting-point is great: every-day life.
It reminds me of something I love to do myself: exploring the..."
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Stop the Madness: A Plea for Grammar Laxity
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"I enjoy when other people write,but seldom write my comments because I am always unsure about my punctuation and grammar.My mother tongue is not..."
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Reading Jane
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Campaign Lingo 2012
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Does Texting Harm or Help Literacy?
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Pleasing the Reader
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"Terrific article, Mr. Lydon. The "Readers like..." tips you provide are pertinent to any aspiring novelist. I'll keep them on my mental cork-board as..."
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A Pre-Reading Activity for "The Hunger Games"
April 10, 2012
How can categorizing words from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games help introduce students to the major themes of the novel?
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Happy Arbor Day from everyone at the Visual Thesaurus! We're celebrating with an arboreal crossword puzzle. Solve it and you could win a Visual Thesaurus T-shirt!
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We've just released a new version of the Visual Thesaurus that works for the iPad and the iPhone, at no extra cost to subscribers. And whether you're using the VT in your Web browser, on your iPhone, or on your iPad, you'll enjoy lightning-fast load times.
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