The Visual Thesaurus is very pleased to announce that we're now working together with The WordMasters Challenge to help students improve their vocabulary! What's WordMasters? As many of you already know, it's a popular national competition for Language Arts students in grades 3 to 12. Over four thousand school teams from every state participate each year. Students will now be able to study WordMasters lists right here on the Visual Thesaurus, with the first list arriving next month! We spoke to the program's founder, Nancy McGrath, to learn more about the challenge.  Continue reading...

No time to stop by the local bookstore to listen to a reading by your favorite author? Why, check out a "blog book tour" -- where writers visit blogs instead of stores. Here are literary blogs that feature authors, their books and book-related conversation, all at your computer-driven fingertips:

The Elegant Variation

Major Bedhead Reviews

Book of Kells

Writing in the Mountains

In this lesson, small groups of ESL students will use the Visual Thesaurus to assist them in figuring out the meanings of some common English language idioms. Students will then create visual images to present their assigned idioms to the class-demonstrating how idioms can be interpreted both figuratively and literally.  Continue reading...

Margalit Fox, the author of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind and the subject of last week's fascinating Behind The Dictionary interview, suggests these books on the linguistics of sign language:

The Signs of Language by Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi

Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf by Oliver Sacks

The Resilience of Language: What Gesture Creation in Deaf Children Can Tell Us About How All Children Learn Language by Susan Goldin-Meadow

When writing a marketing or publicity piece, such as a landing page or press release, you have to know the ins and outs of the product you're writing about. That's a given. However, it is equally important -- if not more so -- to thoroughly understand the target audience as well. That's not always easy.  Continue reading...

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat novel, On the Road. Blogs across the 'net are honoring this occasion, including boingboing, which excerpts an essay written by an old friend of Kerouac's here.

Visual Thesaurus subscriber Debbie Shults is a veteran teacher, literacy coach -- and now, blogger -- who's helping her Sarasota, Florida, middle school define a "new literacy." So what's so new about this new literacy? We spoke to Debbie about innovations in language arts education at her school, where teachers there now make literacy a fundamental part of their class work -- no matter what the subject, from math to gym to shop class (yes, even shop!). How? Read our conversation:  Continue reading...