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10 Best Grammar Resources for Teachers - Grammarly Blog Every day is a grammar day for teachers, but the whole world is invited to celebrate morphology and syntax on the fourth of March—National Grammar Day. Everyone loves a party, but how can you motivate students to embrace good grammar the other 364 days of the year? These ten grammar resources might be just what you need. 1 Visual Aids If students visualize how grammar works, they will be able to understand sentence structure. For example, an infographic on Copyblogger.com explains what a dangling participle is. 2 Online Courses According to its website, the Grammar Challenger helps students “master fifty of the trickiest . . . grammar, punctuation, and word usage” concepts. 3 Interactive Whiteboard Activities Interactive whiteboards project your computer screen on a dry-erase whiteboard. 4 Games What if students could learn and play at the same time? 5 Lesson Plans If you are looking for an effective way to teach a grammar point, other teachers are happy to share what works for them.

57 Literary Devices That’ll Elevate Your Writing (+ Examples) Where were you when your fourth-grade teacher first introduced you to literary devices? (Did you learn about the mighty metaphor? Or maybe its simpering cousin, the simile?) Perhaps you were daydreaming about cheese pizza and wondering what your mom packed you for lunch. Years later, you’re starting to realize that maybe you should’ve taken better notes back then. Because you’re a writer now, or trying to be, and it’s kind of embarrassing when your friends (or worse, your kids) come to you and ask: “What’s an onomatopoeia?” And all you have to say is: “An onomatopoeia? Never again. Not with this handy-dandy list of 57 (count ‘em!) But let’s back up. Starting with… What are Literary Devices? Literary devices are strategies writers use to strengthen ideas, add personality to prose, and ultimately communicate more effectively. So who should care about literary devices? You, of course. How are Literary Devices Different From Rhetorical Devices? So what’s the difference? Alright, enough questions. 1.

Placeholder names in English and other languages | OxfordWords blog If you follow politics, you will have noticed that politicians often invoke the cliché of the ‘man in the street’. You may have heard them referring to the average Joe, Joe Bloggs, John Public, Joe Sixpack, etc. when talking to an audience, addressing everyone and no one, rather than someone in particular. The English language has several of those placeholder names and, more often than not, they denote a male person – implying that the average person is a man, the everyman. There’s also the famous John Doe – the name for an unidentified person that you would come across in a legal context. Here, a female equivalent actually exists: Jane Doe. If you want to talk about ordinary people in general, you may also call them Tom, Dick, and Harry in English, although the Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable notes that this Victorian term is particularly attributed to people unworthy of notice. Of course, placeholder names also exist in other languages. Italian Swedish German

KidsNews | A ready-to go literacy resource for teachers using current daily news stories for students in the classroom. theconversation If you struggle to understand the teenagers and young people around you when they call their schoolfriend a durkboi and try to cadge some peas, you are not alone. The idea that they are communicating in a different language from their parents has been the subject of excited chatter on parenting websites and among some researchers. A defining characteristic of youth slang is thought to be its faddishness – the fact that terms have a rapid turnover, quickly coming in and out of fashion and then disappearing before parents and teachers have time to decode them. The reality is more complicated: novelty is all-important but for each generation the expressions they encounter will be new to them. So although each age group and almost every local clique do invent their own words, there is a common core of slang that persists for years: such as cool, wicked, solid and sick for good, and chilling for relaxing. A wealth of words for the same thing Variations on a theme

How to create a graphic novel with Super Sidekicks For parents and teachers: This is a fun unit of work for years 3-5 that will improve visual literacy, trigger imaginative thinking, improve fine motor skills and increase vocabulary. It is appropriate for independent learning and can be done in an hour, though some students will find they enjoy the activities so much, they will want to keep going. For students: Follow the steps below and by the end of it, you’ll be on your way to creating your own graphic novel, which is a book that is a little bit like a comic. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Your sidekick – draw a picture of them somewhere in this sceneA word that is a sound – draw itA speech bubble and write in what the sidekick is saying If you feel like colouring it in, go ahead. 8. That’s the end of our lesson today but you can continue the Super Sidekicks fun by reading the books, which can be bought online from all good bookstores. P.S. Teachers and parents, further resources around this book can be found here:

10 English words that are difficult to pronounce When you learn a foreign language, there are always certain sounds that are a challenge to get right and certain words that you must struggle to get your tongue around. With English, the erratic spelling system means that even if you have no trouble with the sounds themselves, you may often mispronounce words anyway. To help you out with some of the trickier and more readily-confused ones, here are 10 English words that are difficult to pronounce for learners and some tips for getting them right. (1) Vegetable /ˈvɛdʒ tə bəl/ and comfortable /ˈkʌmf tə bəl/. Neither of these words has anything do with tables. They each have three syllables, not four, and the second and the third are the same for both. (2) Squirrel /ˈskwɪrəl/. (3) Says /sɛz/. (4) Leicester /ˈlɛstər/. (5) Rural /ˈrʊər(ə)l/. (6) Culture /ˈkʌltʃə/. (7) Law /lɔː/. (8) Fortunate /ˈfɔːtʃənət/ and unfortunate /ʌnˈfɔːtʃənət/. (9) Recipe /ˈrɛsɪpi/ and receipt /rɪˈsiːt/. You might also be interested in… – 35 common English proverbs

GrammarCheck.net - Check your text online How Shakespearean are you? The words of Shakespeare are still held, nearly 400 years after his death, to be some of the most poetic ever written and his influence on modern English is indisputable. Contributions such as pound of flesh (Merchant of Venice) and green-eyed monster (Othello) are fairly well-known, but did you know that he was the first person to use the adjectives misplaced (from King Lear) or neighbouring (Henry IV, Part 1); or the adverbs obscenely (Love’s Labour’s Lost) or out of work (Henry V)? These days we often hear accusations of the English language having been dumbed down, so it is interesting to compare English now to that used by Shakespeare. Enter some English text in the box below and click the button. Shakespeare feature loading, please wait… To produce this page we took the freely available text from our 1916 edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and processed it with a script that extracted all the unique words used in the plays.

How Dylan Thomas got playful with English grammar Actor and artistic director Guy Masterson says the famous Welsh poet didn’t so much defy the rules of grammar as stretch them. Guy will be presenting at the next British Council seminar, live-streamed from London on 23 October 2014 as part of the Dylan Thomas Centenary Celebration. It is a joy for me as an actor to speak great words, be it a play, prose or poetry. More to the point, it is an intellectual and emotional challenge to get one’s interpretative jaws around great words and then bring them to life in an meaningful and memorable way. One has to believe, with great writers such as Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), that they intended their words to be spoken out loud and not merely read. And certainly, when you listen to their words lifting off the page, the true richness of their intention is evident. But what makes Dylan Thomas so wonderful, a poet of some of the greatest wordplay in the English language and among the finest of the twentieth century? To Begin At The Beginning

Hip hop vocabulary compared between artists Matt Daniels compared rappers’ vocabularies to find out who knows the most words. Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake. As two points of reference, Daniels also counted the number of unique words in the first 5,000 used words from seven of Shakespeare’s works and the number of uniques from the first 35,000 words of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. I’m not sure how much stock I would put into these literary comparisons though, because this is purely a keyword count. That said, although there could be similar issues within the rapper comparisons, I bet the counts are more comparable.

Why is English so weirdly different from other langu... English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. More weirdness? Why is our language so eccentric? English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Crucially, their languages were quite unlike English.