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...

Teachers, have you heard of jeggings? Well, if you haven't, surely your students have. Jeggings are skin-tight stretchy jeans, and their name was formed by fusing the words jeans and leggings. Jeggings and other popular words these days, like chillaxing and bromance, are all considered blends or portmanteau words — and worth exploring as a part of your students' word study.  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.”

Once upon a time, in a suburban St. Louis County high school almost thirty years ago, there studied a girl who couldn’t seem to write an essay to save her life. She watched the papers come back. AP European History—D-. AP English—C. But owing to smaller class sizes and tenacious teachers who bled all over her paper with red ink, this girl began to see her mistakes. She tightened. She tweaked. She revised. She edited.  Continue reading...

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...

Last summer, a teacher friend of mine was trying to decide whether to use a new book in her classroom in the coming school year. We spent a long time weighing the merits: in favor of doing so was the stay against boredom that introducing a new text provides. Against? "I would like to not go entirely insane with work this year," she mentioned. Ah yes. The impossible dream.  Continue reading...