This week we are celebrating the January 15th birth of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.. Although King's life was cut short by a brutal assassination at the age of 39, he is thought of as one of the United States' most memorable orators and a champion of nonviolence and racial equality.  Continue reading...

This week's worksheet asks students to reflect on some of the major events of 2010 and to use the Visual Thesaurus to help them answer some questions about those events.  Continue reading...

It's that time of year — to make New Year's resolutions and to toast to a stronger vocabulary (that's your resolution, right?) Well, to help your students fulfill their resolution of expanding their vocabularies in 2011, we are sending them a worksheet that will help them figure out what some words containing the Latin root nov all have in common.  Continue reading...

If you are asking too many questions, would you rather be called “curious” or “nosy”? Even though these words have similar meanings, they have very different connotations. This week’s two-page worksheet presents students with twelve pairs of words with similar definitions but different connotations.  Continue reading...

Idioms can act as roadblocks and detours on the road to learning English — for ELL students and native speakers alike. In this "Idiom Workout," we chose some idioms that can be found in the Visual Thesaurus database and that have "idiom cousins" with the same starter words (i.e., get the..., in a..., on the...).  Continue reading...

Use this week's worksheet to give young students an opportunity to explore antonyms in the Visual Thesaurus. Antonyms, pairs of words expressing opposite concepts, are connected by dashed red lines in Visual Thesaurus word maps. Using the VT, students will find antonyms for eleven adjectives and then unscramble some mysterious letters to solve a puzzle. Click here for the worksheet and here for a related lesson plan, "It's Opposite Day."  Continue reading...

November 23rd has been named Fibonacci Day since 11-23 doubles as the date's abbreviation and the first numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence (1, 1, 2, 3...). The Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci used this sequence in lots of wacky ways--from predicting the population growth of rabbits to exploring the "golden ratio" formed between two consecutive numbers in the sequence.  Continue reading...