Click on this link for a fun site where teachers and parents can find so many crafts, projects, history lessons, and quizzes that help children develop and understanding of the 4th of July while celebrating it in a meaningful way.
Superlatives and comparatives seems to be a nice fit with lessons where you are demonstrating comparing and contrasting.
Adding the crucial ingredient of these grammar structures to your compare and contrast lessons will expand your students’ sentence structure knowledge, which they can later use as they form ideas for their explanations, paragraphs, and opinions. It can also be used to present morphology in vocabulary and shades in meaning.
Yield: 6 lessons
As defined, come means to move closer to the speaker; go, for the most part, means movement in another direction. The word go gets confused with come because both involve movement, but the difference between come and go have more to do with the perspective of the person using the words. Identifying where the speaker is will help clarify the subtle difference in usage between come and go.
Just when you thought it was difficult for Americans to communicate with English language learners, NPR recently did a report, which you can read here, about the collection of regional phrases in English, called the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). This collection of regional spoken English is turning out to be pretty handy for Americans to understand each other from sea to shining sea.
Doctors also use the DARE to understand patients who use colorful language to describe their illnesses. A patient complaining of “the groundage” or “pipjennies” likely has a rash on the feet or pimples.
The dictionary has approximately 75,000 entries of colloquial English usage collected from all over the United States. Some of these unusual phrases are only used within a few square miles of the country!
As for ESL students, it won’t help you speak better if you try to learn all of the colloquialisms; it is argued (in your favor) that English is becoming more homogeneous, probably for the purpose of cushioning the sometimes bumpy pathways of communication…
Stephanie Grayson, the founder of CorporateSpeechTrainer.com, says in some ways, American language is becoming more uniform, and television and the Internet are giving us all a common vocabulary.
In other ways, however, language evolves as a result of more personal conversations within small groups, families, and communities. Here, the article refers to Stanford University linguist John Rickford saying
people speak one way in e-mails and another way at the local coffee shop: “The primary driving force behind language use and language change is face-to-face interaction. And that takes place in smaller communities and smaller groups, the kinds of people you hang out with.”
Who do you agree with? Is it just as important to teach and learn colloquialisms as it is to teach basic communication and fluency? As English speakers, does it bother you to simplify or generalize your speech when speaking to non-native speakers?
If you want an overview of your new language to be able to speak with ease and fluency, you can go with Globish, but if you want an intimate knowledge of the language that people around you are using, I DARE you to dig a little deeper.
When the grammar lesson is complete, and the worksheets are corrected, what comes next? Here are 6 Role PlaySkit ideas for you to use in your classes so your students can practice various grammar functions in a fun and realistic way.
The first one is blank for flexibility.
The best part is…they’re available in PDF.
There are many activity options for Richmonders, native and newcomers alike, this summer. Try this list for some ideas…
Have fun, and if you see me there, stop and say Hi!
Pay students, and they will learn. Why didn’t we think of this before? In this New York Post article, a study shows that students’ grades improve when there is a [privately funded] cash reward for high performance. Hey, money talks. There’s no denying it.
To quote the article…
But many reported seeing indisputable academic benefits — including more motivation, better focus and an increase in healthy competition for good grades among students.
Could more green in the educational diet actually be bad for us? Short-sighted cash for grades seems to be the solution to little more than boredom with the status quo and a lack of creativity for sustainable solutions to inequitable education and poverty. On the other hand, money might just be a good short term solution. It could be used as a lesson to explore investing in one’s future or long term goals (such as purchasing a computer or saving for college).
In the long term, however, it will be important to review the Spark program’s overall value to the students, the teachers, the education system, and to see whether it’s true that as the cash value for a student’s grade increases, the intrinsic value of motivation, volunteerism, teamwork, and teaching decreases (which, coincidentally, are undeniable characteristics of a strong society and a healthy workforce).
I wonder if the program’s founder, Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was paid in middle school and how that would have affected his drive to succeed.
Here’s an activity practicing the use of single and double quotes…when someone is quoting someone else.
Quotation Marks: Single and Double (quoting someone who’s quoting)
Use your main idea skills to answer questions that ask the following:
You can safely eliminate details from your answer choices if the question asks about the main idea.
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