In Bob Greenman's "Teachers at Work" column about the value of having students appreciate and create similes, he astutely points out that while writers should avoid using a simile that is a cliche ("smart as a whip," etc.), they should also establish "a comparison with something almost any reader can picture or identify with." Continue reading...

Teachers, looking to get students out of their seats and learning some new words? Try introducing pantomime as a vocabulary-enriching activity. As Beck, McKeown and Kucan point out in Creating Robust Vocabulary, "physically responding to words can promote connections to new word meanings." Continue reading...

Sometimes our vocational ed (CTE) students have a difficult time reading technical literature because the heavy use of jargon gets in their way, hampering comprehension and frustrating those students who may prefer hands-on learning situations. VocabGrabber can help prevent this experience: students can "grab" a text's jargon beforehand, preview those terms, and then head back to the text with a good understanding of the key concepts they will encounter while reading. Continue reading...

If you ask a roomful of students to close their eyes and to picture a person who is suffering from acrophobia ("a morbid fear of great heights"), what will they visualize? Some students might picture a person timorously peering off a cliff while other students might envision a person refusing to clean the gutters of their house's rooftop. Continue reading...

While many teachers may have their students keep vocabulary logs of the unfamiliar words they encounter in books they are reading or from the world at large, few require students to take the extra steps to ensure a deeper or more meaningful understanding of these words. Continue reading...

A word wall is pretty much what it sounds like — a classroom wall reserved for a word display. Most teachers associate word walls with emergent readers, but word walls are no longer just the stuff of elementary schools. Word walls can be used effectively to help students at all levels to learn vocabulary. Continue reading...