One of the most fun parts of teaching English to students is by letting them discover figurative language.  Figurative language is any speech that is not meant to be taken literally.  Students in traditional classrooms and ESL classrooms will enjoy learning about three of the most interesting types of figurative language in English: idioms, oxymorons, [...]

Who doesn’t like a riddle, right??  Riddles stretch our brain muscles and make us think in “outside-the-box” kind of ways.  One of many children’s favorite kinds of riddles are the ones that lead to rhyming pairs of words.  Often called “Hink Pink” (one syllable) or “Hinky Pinky” (two syllables), or “Hinkety Pinkety” (three syllables) these [...]

If I overhear a part of a conversation at the next table in a restaurant where a woman says she pushed her brother off the bridge, I am likely to want to call the authorities.  But if I had heard the part of the conversation before that, I would know that she and her husband [...]

My dad was an English teacher and was obsessed by words.  It wasn’t unusual for us to be walking along a sidewalk or down a store aisle when he would suddenly turn to me and ask me if I knew the root word of the word “obligingly.”  Not knowing that this was unusual in the [...]

Do you have a particular homophone weakness?  You know…a pair of words that you can’t ever seem to remember which one to use when??  Mine is most definitely the homophone pair hangar and hanger.  I am NEVER sure which one holds clothes and which one holds airplanes.  Maybe you have more than one set that [...]

Compound words can be surprisingly fun for students to study. (A compound word is made when two or more words are joined – – with or without a hyphen – -  to form a new word and subsequently, a new meaning.) Don’t miss this opportunity to really engage your students.  One school has annual Compound [...]

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 [...]

One of the things even young children can usually do easily is come up with “opposites.”  If you ask them what is the opposite of “happy”, they can generally guess “sad.”  The opposite of “cold” is “hot.”  These comparisons are called antonyms. Antonyms are word pairs with opposite meanings. Some words can have more than [...]