The College Board abandoned the analogy as a SAT vocabulary question type in 2005. Those of us who remember taking SAT-style analogies are either nostalgic for the short word puzzles or are still traumatized by the sight of those tricky pairs of words mysteriously situated between single and double colons.  Continue reading...

Word lessons are everywhere--even on minivan billboards. The new ad campaign for the Honda Odyssey prominently features the neologism “Vanquility.”  Continue reading...

After years of fine-tuning individual state standards for education, the tide has turned. No longer will many administrators and teachers turn to their state standards to determine what to teach and when; they will instead look to the Common Core Standards as the new "gold standard" of standards. As of today, the Common Core State Standards Initiative — brainchild of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) — has successfully wooed at least thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia.  Continue reading...

Many secondary school teachers may be dismissive about using manipulatives in the classroom. They may think of word cards and word puzzles as belonging in the elementary school realm, along with crayons and counting cubes. However, when it comes to vocabulary learning, it can sometimes be a more engaging way to teach words as individual manipulative units rather than lists of tiny words printed out on 8 ½ x 11 sheets of paper. After all, why do so many adults have fridge doors covered in magnetic poetry?  Continue reading...

When developing writers are striving to be more "descriptive" and vivid in their creative writing, they often turn to adverbs as one of their enhancement tools (understandably — since they are words that are intended to modify or qualify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.) However, when students begin to learn some of the more sophisticated standards for writing, teachers often advise them to avoid adverbs and to instead reach for powerful verbs that "show" instead of "tell" about their subjects and their actions.  Continue reading...

If you are in the ed world, chances are you have heard the acronym RTI being batted around but you may not be able to explain its rationale or be able to envision how this model of "intervention" could play out in your classroom.  Continue reading...

How can you say you know a word if you have never spoken it aloud? How can you "own" a word if you have never used it? These are some of the questions that Heidi Hayes Jacobs prompts us to consider in her widely acclaimed book for educators Active Literacy Across the Curriculum.  Continue reading...