Use this week's worksheet to give young students an opportunity to explore antonyms in the Visual Thesaurus. Antonyms, pairs of words expressing opposite concepts, are connected by dashed red lines in Visual Thesaurus word maps. Using the VT, students will find antonyms for eleven adjectives and then unscramble some mysterious letters to solve a puzzle. Click here for the worksheet and here for a related lesson plan, "It's Opposite Day."  Continue reading...

Writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker has a dark secret she has to reveal.

Here's my confession: In the summer, I don't care about rules. I pen prose that would give a good copy editor a heart attack. I don't mind if someone "lays" down for a nap, I get in the line for "ten items or less" and refrain from muttering fewer under my breath. The news "impacts"people and I don't flinch. It's very liberating. The down side of all this is when friends—or worse, new acquaintances—ask me word questions and I give wrong answers. It's not that I do a brain cleanse every June, it's that I can't articulate the rules when I'm not really thinking about them.  Continue reading...

November 23rd has been named Fibonacci Day since 11-23 doubles as the date's abbreviation and the first numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence (1, 1, 2, 3...). The Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci used this sequence in lots of wacky ways--from predicting the population growth of rabbits to exploring the "golden ratio" formed between two consecutive numbers in the sequence.  Continue reading...

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. Here Fitch considers one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the English-language classroom: the dastardly phrasal verb.  Continue reading...

One hundred and forty-seven years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most famous American speeches: The Gettysburg Address, a speech that reportedly lasted less than two minutes and that he considered "a flat failure." Use this worksheet to help students use vocabulary and key lines from the address to discover Lincoln's lasting message to Americans.  Continue reading...

(Read part one of "The Nitty-Gritty Essay" here.)

I'm not sure what the deal is, but people have a fixation with five-paragraph essays. It's as if five is some magical number that a good essay must have. However, that couldn't be further from the truth. Some essays simply aren't worth five paragraphs, and can suffice with three or even four paragraphs. Some need ten or more. For those writers who struggle with composition, it's what's in the paragraphs that counts, and how long the paragraphs are.  Continue reading...