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...