These sites help educators incorporate current events into their teaching, across the curriculum. 

The New York Times Learning Network

TIME for Kids 

Scholastic's Upfront

NewsHour Extra's Teacher Resources

NBC News iCue

Once again award-winning writer and educator Bob Greenman takes us on a journey through words selected from More Words That Make a Difference, a delightful book illustrating word usage with passages from the Atlantic Monthly. Here Bob muses on the start of another school year, with an ardor that is far from noncommittal. Continue reading...

"...Once more, or close the wall up with our English dead." Appropriate words to start a new school year.

See what I did there? Our English dead? Like, our English Language Arts dead? Funny stuff, right?!

Sorry. I'm writing this during the second week of school. Just having pants on is a major accomplishment. Continue reading...

Tomorrow is September 17th — otherwise known as Constitution Day, a day when all U.S. educational institutions that receive federal funding are required by law to pay a little attention to the document that was signed on September 17, 1787.

Teachers, check out the following links to discover some fun ways to spend Constitution Day. Continue reading...

In this selection from Inside Words: Tools for Teaching Academic Vocabulary, Janet Allen presents a great instructional activity to make words come alive for students, encouraging them to see how vocabulary relates to real-world context. Continue reading...

By the time they enter high school, most students know that a simile is a literary device used to show a similarity between two dissimilar things, and that the words "like" or "as" link the dissimilar things, as in "busy as a bee," "like a fish out of water," "as big as a house," and "fits like a glove." They know, too, that similes differ from metaphors in that metaphors dispense with "like" or "as" and get right to the point: "He's a rat." "Life is but a walking shadow." (Not all similes employ "as" or "like," as here: "On a normal day, Jennifer Capriati tends to rush through games with the haste of a short-order cook, moving from point to point without a pause.") Continue reading...

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...