Making Vocabulary Instruction Active With Language Field Guides
One of my former students, Michelle Kirchner, is a Ph.D. student in entomology and biology at North Carolina State University. Her specialty is ants.Whether 70 feet up in a tree or digging a hole to find them, Michelle learns about ants by taking careful notes in her field notebook, building a record of her discoveries…
Learn Vocabulary All Year With The New York Times
Note: This calendar is available as a printable PDF.Every school day since 2009, The Learning Network has helped students learn a new vocabulary word. Last year, however, students showed us they were eager to do more than just understand definitions. During our inaugural Vocabulary Challenges, they transformed each month’s words into clever stories, poems and…
June Vocabulary Challenge
Winners From Our May Vocabulary ChallengeCongratulations to Shannon, Julia and Montgomery, who wrote about a fisherman’s hairdo, an intense athletic practice and a poisonous berry bush. Each of these students used several challenging vocabulary words to bring their characters and scenes to life.Shannon Arnold, age 14, Mark T Sheehan High School, Wallingford, Conn.The JAUNTY fisherman’s…
May Vocabulary Challenge
Winners From Our April Vocabulary ChallengeCongratulations to Sophia, Samuel and Adam, who imbued their entries with personality and style while adhering to our stringent guidelines. Many of the pieces we read were jam-packed with vocabulary words, but these stood out for their fluid incorporation of words from our word list into three coherent stories.In our…
March Vocabulary Challenge
Every school day, we define a new vocabulary word in our Word of the Day column and provide an example of how the word has been used in The New York Times. But you don’t have to be a Times journalist to contextualize a vocabulary word within a piece of writing — students can do…
The Winners of Our 2020 Vocabulary Video Contest for High Schoolers
One of the top ten winners of our high school contest: vex by Steven Xie, Elliot Azzi, Arek Zenel Walasek and Korinne Hennel. The world is a scary place right now. Let us offer you a break from it with these delightful 15-second videos created by teenagers.In January, we challenged students to define one of…
The Winners of Our 2020 Vocabulary Video Contest for Middle Schoolers
One of the top three winners of our middle school contest: cartographer by Soobin Lee. This is the first year we have been experimenting with offering our contests, which have long been open to students 13 years old and up, to younger students. And so far, we have not been disappointed with the results.Last month,…
