Topic : Language arts
Transition words can act like road signs for the reader — by providing indications of what is to come in the phrase, sentence, or paragraph. This week's worksheet asks students to explore the meanings and uses of some common transition words on The Visual Thesaurus and to then categorize those transition words according to the roles they play in context.
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Article Topics:WordshopVocab activities for your classroomBeware the Obscure Adjective, Gelid in its Untouched Tomb June 13, 2012
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."
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Do you know the grammatical mnemonic "FANBOYS"? It's an acronym for the coordinating conjunctions for, and, nor, but, or, and yet. Seems pretty handy, right? Not so much: Erin Brenner argues that "FANBOYS" hides more than it reveals.
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Article Topics:Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About LanguageProgressive Reform May 30, 2012 By Neal Whitman
In a class for speakers of English as a foreign language, Neal Whitman found himself teaching odd five-verb forms like "will have been being seen" and "would have been being seen." How did we end up with such unusual verb pile-ups?
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The suffix -ify means "to make," and you will commonly find it forming the ending of some tricky transitive verbs (e.g., petrify: to make into stone; rectify: to make right). Using this week's worksheet, teachers can have students look up some -ify verbs in the Visual Thesaurus, learn their definitions, and then write original sentence for each verb by using a sentence frame as their guide.
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Article Topics:WordshopVocab activities for your classroomTeaching Verbs and Confronting the Skunk May 15, 2012 By Georgia Scurletis
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?
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I recently witnessed one of those lightbulb illuminating moments when someone suddenly "got it." What this language learner "got" was the difference between adjectives and nouns prefixed with un-, and verbs prefixed with un-. The adjective/noun becomes negative, but the verb typically has its action reversed: unusual vs. unwrap, for example.
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