What's A Word?

Engage young learners in expanding their vocabulary with these fun games and activities. Children learn how compound words, root words, and affixes provide clues about the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary. These six activities get...

Practice word parts with a lesson about roots, prefixes, and suffixes. As kids work through a lesson that lists examples of each, they decipher common words by applying the meanings of their word parts to each one.

Teach children how small, simple words can join together to make large compound words with a fun vocabulary game. Working in pairs, students take turns drawing definition cards as they attempt to identify all of the compound words on the...

Possessive or plural? The class identifies singular and plural possessive pronouns in sentences, writes possessive pronouns that take the place of underlined words, and completes a multiple choice quiz. There are 32 questions to...

Have you ever wondered how to create a successful word wall? The first two pages of this document highlight the positive benefits for having a word wall. There's also a section that presents the word wall routine which presents how and...

Gadzooks! Where do new words come from? Who decides what a word means? What about memes? Young etymologists will be fascinated by a short video all about words, words, words.

Use the Visual Thesaurus to predict the subject matter of Rick Riordan's book The Lightning Thief. A pre-reading activity encourages middle schoolers to use context clues and word meaning to discover what the book is about. After they...

How can you make a narrative writing piece more engaging? A lesson about narrative writing transition words and phrase prompts elementary writers to draft, peer edit, and revise writing based on feedback and expectations outlined in an...

Fourth graders, after brainstorming what the word "guide" means, examine how to use guide words in a dictionary to locate words. They define "guide," identify guide words in a variety of dictionaries and locate words using guide words....

What's the best resource to use when looking up words? Use Visual Thesaurus to see a word's meaning. The class accesses the interactive website and then compares and contrasts the difference between using a traditional dictionary and the...