As 2010 winds down, word-watchers are reflecting on a year of vuvuzelas and robo-signers, gleeks and mama grizzlies. Let's take a look back at some of the lexical highlights from the past year.  Continue reading...

We recently spoke to Nancy Mack, author of Teaching Grammar with Playful Poems, to find out how she was inspired to use poetry as an innovative entry point for teaching grammatical patterns to young students.  Continue reading...

How can students use prefixes to help them transform words' meanings and to decode unfamiliar words?  Continue reading...

Subject-verb agreement sounds easy, doesn’t it? A singular subject takes singular verb, and a plural subject takes a plural verb. Yet The Copyeditor's Handbook lists no fewer than 25 cases that aren't so clear-cut, and Garner's Modern American Usage devotes nearly 5 columns to the topic. Even the comparatively diminutive Grammar Smart devotes five pages (including quizzes) to the topic. What makes subject-verb agreement so hard?  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...

If your students are looking to read a book in which words play an important role in the plot, then here are two great suggestions:

• Frindle by Andrew Clements
  
  
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

The Visual Thesaurus will have an exhibit at the 2011 Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL. Visit us at Booth #845! Click here for conference details.