It is difficult to talk about vocabulary without also talking about spelling.  Educators have shown that spelling not only improves reading and writing fluency but also vocabulary and comprehension. Words are the building blocks of the English language, and one cannot really communicate well without having skills in both vocabulary AND spelling. When the study [...]

If you ever had even one classroom lesson on diagramming sentences, then you probably feel the sudden urge to run – – far, far away – – when you hear the phrase “parts of speech”.  But the truth is that understanding the parts of speech and how they fit together makes writing and reading make [...]

Human beings can get a bit lazy when it comes to speech.  Over time, we have figured out that we can create “shortcuts” in our everyday language that say what we want to say in a shorter amount of syllables.  This is true not just for English, but for many other languages as well. In [...]

Do you remember the “clapping game” from elementary school?  The teacher would write a word on the chalkboard and the class would clap out the syllables in that word.  It was a fun and common sense introduction to the individual sound units within a word. As the basic unit of written and spoken language, syllables [...]