Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Language arts
In Vocabulary at the Core, Amy Benjamin and John T. Crow assert that word study should play a more significant role in English class and across the curriculum — as emphasized by the Common Core State Standards. In this excerpt, Benjamin and Crow explain the difference between receptive control and productive control of words and why our students' receptive vocabulary remains considerably larger than their productive vocabulary.
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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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Teachers at WorkA column about teaching
Dear Diary, Today I Learned to Spell: Journaling and Spelling in the Classroom
An ongoing struggle in the English Language Arts classroom is improving students' spelling habits. We educators know that good spelling is a crucial skill; is there anything more likely to derail a résumé or essay than a spelling error? Yet it's also a skill that requires assiduous practice on the part of our students.
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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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WordshopVocab activities for your classroom
Beware the Obscure Adjective, Gelid in its Untouched Tomb
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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