Award-winning educator Bob Greenman says teachers should promote pun-making in the classroom. "The pun is liberating," Greenman writes. "It says to students, you can make language do as you please. You can twist words to make them your own. You can make connections between two entirely different things and think on two planes at once. You can improvise language and play with words. Isn't that a great thing to help develop in students?"  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...

Today is the 11th annual commemoration of International Mother Language Day. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) asks the world community to celebrate linguistic diversity and the promotion of mother tongues. Read more from the United Nations here, and check out the LingEducator blog for ideas about classroom activities.

We welcome back Fitch O'Connell, a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, working for the British Council in Portugal and other European countries. Fitch considers how a fun exercise in concocting collective nouns could be used as a tool for vocabulary expansion.  Continue reading...

Literature is everywhere. Well, literary allusions are everywhere, that is.

Students of today live in a time where they have always known cable television, computers and cell phones. Movies come in the mail or via the Wii. Yet that doesn’t mean the classics of literature have faded away. They are around — often referenced in new forms or adapted completely.  Continue reading...

A cold and brisk hello from snowy New York City! Winter is a great time to, as a friend of mine said, "Cozy down," at home and in the classroom. To that end, I've been knitting, reading and cooking a lot at home, and digging in with my kids to improve our practices at school.  Continue reading...