Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from September, 2015
Here are some ideas about how you can inspire the students at your school to get involved with the Vocabulary Bowl, setting achievable goals that will provide incentives to keep them going on the road to vocabulary mastery.
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Topics:
Vocabulary Bowl
Tips & Tricks
Jumpstart Word Learning with the Vocabulary.com Classroom Starter Kit
A step-by-step guide and best practices for getting started and ensuring success
One of the benefits of Vocabulary.com is how quickly teachers can set up classes and get students learning words through our game. But now, using a handy Classroom Starter Kit, we're hoping teachers will first review best practices and some of the game's in and outs as they get started using the game.
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Topics:
Vocabulary Bowl
Teachers at WorkA column about teaching
Collaborative List Creation: Now That's an Idea!
An eighth grade teacher shakes up her Monday morning vocab routine with Vocabulary.com
Eighth grade teacher Erin Vanek decided to shake up her Monday morning vocabulary routine with Vocabulary.com, and her experiment with collaborative list creation paid off. Read on to discover how you can use collaborative list creation to ground your students' introduction to words as they are used, and not as they are defined.
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In his latest batch of under-the-radar euphemisms, Mark Peters introduces such linguistic doozies as "ethical cheating," an oxymoronic term that came to light after the Ashley Madison hacking hubbub.
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Under the HoodThe science of vocabulary building
What's the Most Relevant Word in "Moby Dick"?
Backed by a 3.2 billion word corpus, our list builder gets it right every time.
In our coverage of the first Republican presidential candidates' debate last month, we used our vocabulary list builder to find the most relevant word each candidate used. Now, before Republicans take to the stage again, we want to explain what we mean by "relevance." Understanding it sheds light on not just how we're analyzing candidates' speech, but also how we're pulling vocabulary from academic and literary texts.
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Blog Excerpts
Celebrating Labor (and Labour) Day
On the first Monday in September, the United States observes Labor Day, while Canadians celebrate Labour Day. If you want to know why labour is the accepted spelling in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries like Canada, while Americans prefer labor (and color, favor, honor, humor, and neighbor), check out this classic Word Routes column by Ben Zimmer.
Topics:
Words
Tips & Tricks
To Create a Culture of Word Learning, Get School Rivalries Going
Competition within a district fires up game play for all.
Last school year, we noted an interesting trend among the most successful schools playing in our annual Vocabulary Bowl: they were operating in an environment of district-wide play.
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