Young Men's Leadership Academy and Vocabulary.com
Young men from the 'wrong zip code' gain national respect
At any given time of the day, you could zoom into any of our high school classrooms, and find scholars on their laptops, phones, or other devices – surprisingly – logged into their Vocabulary.com accounts and working on vocabulary lists: Not Candy Crush or any other game, but Vocabulary.com!
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Last year, I turned to Vocabulary.com to enliven my approach to teaching the words of To Kill a Mockingbird.
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Fiction Prediction: Using Words as a Gateway into a Text
Vocabulary Lists as Clues in a Guessing Game
Language arts teacher Erin Vanek created a quick, clever vocab-based guessing game to spark her students' curiosity about a book she was about to assign. The result: students who are curious about the story and familiar with some of the key terms they'll see when they read.
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Three Steps to Schoolwide Vocab Learning
How teacher Erin Vanek gets her colleagues hooked on Vocabulary.com.
If you're a teacher using Vocabulary.com, a great way to bump up your students' word learning is to take Vocabulary.com schoolwide. Class-to-class competition will create a word learning culture within your school, and your students' Words Mastered numbers will climb. Here's how one teacher made that happen within her school.
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Topics:
Vocabulary Bowl
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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Learning English from Your Linguistic Landscape
Finding the idioms, language jokes, and wordplay all around you
Beadazzled is the name of a shop in a small town in the UK. A church in a city in Australia encourages passersby to "Prevent Truth Decay – Brush up on you Bible." These signs create something linguists Rodrigue Landry and Richard Y. Bourhis defined as "the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region or urban agglomeration" and they are all useful tools in the teaching of English to non-native speakers.
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One of the students in my Fiction Writing Workshop told a classmate to take a red pen and cross out the multitude of adverbs he had strewn throughout his story. The rest of the class nodded their heads in agreement. But just before I could move us on to the next item on the agenda, the author asked the young woman who'd spoken up, "But why? Why can't I use adverbs?"
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