April 14th is "Poem in Your Pocket Day," and we here at the Visual Thesaurus don't want to leave you unprepared with only a bit of lint to line your pockets. This week's worksheet can inspire your students to write word association poems with the help of the VT.  Continue reading...

If you see a word that begins with the three letters m-a-l, do you get an uneasy feeling? Well, if you don't, maybe you should. This week's worksheet asks students to explore four common words beginning with the Latin prefix mal on the Visual Thesaurus and discover what all of their meanings have in common. Click here to find the worksheet, and here to read the related lesson plan, “Rooting One’s Way to Meaning.”

This week marks the opening of the 2011 baseball season. Teachers, what better way to prepare your students for the season than to give them a little baseball vocabulary preview? Every sport has its own vocabulary, and baseball is no exception.  Continue reading...

Have you ever tried to figure out a word in another language because you recognized part of the word from your home language, and then you found out you were on the wrong track? Sounds like you might have been caught in a false cognate trap, the subject of this week's worksheet.  Continue reading...

In celebration of the birth of Albert Einstein on March 14th, we are featuring an excerpt from his famous letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt — notifying the president of the potential of nuclear chain reactions being used in a new type of bomb.  Continue reading...

What better way to toast the 107th birthday of Dr. Seuss than to play with rhyming couplets — his favorite form of writing? In this week's worksheet, students use a famous excerpt from Horton Hears a Who! to learn some vocabulary and to complete the rhyming couplets in the text.  Continue reading...

In this week's worksheet, we celebrate George Washington's birthday with a Word Sort that helps students brush up on their parts of speech and some vocabulary associated with the holiday.  Continue reading...