Our latest Wordshop feature comes to us from Steven Kushner, who teaches at Bremen High School in Midlothian, Illinois. Steven drew on inspiration from family road trips to come up with a Mad Libs-style memory recall activity for the classroom.  Continue reading...

I was recently asked by a young and annoyingly successful poet how I thought language learners dealt with the special demands that poetry puts on the reader, and the discussion that followed led us into a marvelous land.  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...

Recently I made a big gaffe in one of my columns. Despite the fact I read my columns over dozens of times, and then I have a peer edit, and then there's a Visual Thesaurus editor who reads and edits, I still misspelled the name of one of my favorite authors. (I also was chided for making up words, but as an author that's my creative prerogative and we can debate my taking that license another time.)  Continue reading...

Do you remember the anti-red pen mania of a few years ago? If you worked in education, you probably do. This movement, arising from who knows where (I suspect the Chair of a Department of Education at a major university), stipulated that teachers should abandon the dreaded red pen for correcting students’ work. Too much red pen was debilitating, apparently, leaving students far too despondent to even consider making the suggested corrections. As I recall, we were encouraged, instead, to use green or purple pen, which carried less stigma.  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...