Figment is an online community for teens and young-adults to create, discover, and share new reading and writing. Figment enables its users to read amateur and professional content and create their own unfiltered creative writing to share with their peers on web and mobile networks. Since launching in December, Figment has more than 35,000 registered users and more than 75,000 individual pieces of writing. Check it out here!

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...

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...

Teacher/novelist Michele Dunaway writes, "as much as I preach individual choice in reading, I do believe there should be some literary works that everyone in middle and high school reads and experiences." Here Michele shares some of her favorite teaching touchstones.  Continue reading...

Theodore Geisel, the man we know as Dr. Seuss, would be happy to know that his books for children are ideally suited for the iPad. "The tablet delivers the active connection between words and images that Dr. Seuss always intended," L. Gordon Crovitz writes in the Wall Street Journal. Read about the success of "e-Seuss" here.

If your students are looking to read a book in which words play an important role in the plot, then here are two great suggestions:

• Frindle by Andrew Clements
  
  
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster