http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/?utm_source=rss Vocab activities for your classroom Copyright 2013, Thinkmap Inc. All Rights Reserved. en Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/images/common/logo_on_white.gif http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/?utm_source=rss Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/staring-glancing-and-glaring-through-stephenie-meyers-twilight?utm_source=rss Despite its popularity among teens, you're not going to find class sets of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series in the English department book rooms across the country. Even if most teachers don't incorporate trendy literature into their class syllabus, it doesn't mean that they can't take advantage of the excitement of the fad and harness it to teach some valuable lessons about writing, editing, and word choice. Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/staring-glancing-and-glaring-through-stephenie-meyers-twilight Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/getting-in-to-prefixes?utm_source=rss Flexible and inflexible are opposites, but flammable and inflammable are not. Why is this? From a morphological and contextual perspective, Susan Ebbers discusses how to help students come to grips with confusing words, including inflammable, impregnable, and infamous. Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/getting-in-to-prefixes Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/for-the-new-year-five-simple-vocabulary-resolutions-for-educators?utm_source=rss The bad news: SAT reading scores have reached an all-time low, and recently released NAEP scores reveal that American students' vocabulary growth is "flat." The good news: It's no longer 2012. It's 2013, a new year, a time to buy gym memberships and to overhaul your vocabulary instruction. Just do it. Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/for-the-new-year-five-simple-vocabulary-resolutions-for-educators Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/happy-vs-merry-a-holiday-perspective?utm_source=rss For the holiday season, vocabulary expert Susan Ebbers discusses several interesting differences between happy and merry, providing applications and lesson suggestions for grades K-12. Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/happy-vs-merry-a-holiday-perspective Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/growing-students-vocabularies-one-tree-at-a-time?utm_source=rss Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth planted an inspirational seed in 5th grade teacher Francesca Leibowitz's mind: "What if our class were to grow a Word Orchard by planting roots and affixes? And what if the fruits of our labor (pun fully intended) were those morphemes' derivatives?" Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/growing-students-vocabularies-one-tree-at-a-time Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/prefixes-windows-into-unfamiliar-words?utm_source=rss As teachers begin to grapple with the demands of the Common Core State Standards, they may be overlooking a discrete language standard living in the shadows of those major shifts. Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/prefixes-windows-into-unfamiliar-words Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/on-like-minds-and-free-speech?utm_source=rss In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers considers how interest influences student learning. She focuses on a timely legal question sure to interest students and engage them in debate: whether Facebook "likes" count as free speech. Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/on-like-minds-and-free-speech Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/readability-the-common-core-and-vocabulary?utm_source=rss One way to help students grapple with more complex texts is to be more transparent about measurements of readability in the classroom. Reveal to students the readability of a text before reading it, and engage in meaningful discussions about what makes a text difficult. Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/readability-the-common-core-and-vocabulary Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/beware-the-obscure-adjective-gelid-in-its-untouched-tomb?utm_source=rss In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers provides teachers with some creative suggestions for showing students how to make the most of adjectives, "those fabulous descriptors that comprise about one-fourth of the words in the language." Wed, 13 Jun 2012 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/beware-the-obscure-adjective-gelid-in-its-untouched-tomb Wordshop http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/teaching-verbs-and-confronting-the-skunk?utm_source=rss 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? Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordshop/teaching-verbs-and-confronting-the-skunk