For the holiday season, vocabulary expert Susan Ebbers discusses several interesting differences between happy and merry, providing applications and lesson suggestions for grades K-12.
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Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth planted an inspirational seed in 5th grade teacher Francesca Leibowitz's mind: "What if our class were to grow a Word Orchard by planting roots and affixes? And what if the fruits of our labor (pun fully intended) were those morphemes' derivatives?"
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As teachers begin to grapple with the demands of the Common Core State Standards, they may be overlooking a discrete language standard living in the shadows of those major shifts.
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In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers considers how interest influences student learning. She focuses on a timely legal question sure to interest students and engage them in debate: whether Facebook "likes" count as free speech.
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One way to help students grapple with more complex texts is to be more transparent about measurements of readability in the classroom. Reveal to students the readability of a text before reading it, and engage in meaningful discussions about what makes a text difficult.
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In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers provides teachers with some creative suggestions for showing students how to make the most of adjectives, "those fabulous descriptors that comprise about one-fourth of the words in the language."
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If "grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts," how can teachers confront the skunk when it comes to explaining how verbs work?
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Topics:
Language arts
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