Thanks to Pr. Rene Castillero of Martin Luther Grammar School in Sheridan, Wyoming, I was reminded of an online publication produced by Memoria Press called Classical Teaching. Back issues may also be read there. You may sign up to be put on their mailing list here. Discussions on any of these articles or issues may be initiated using our website's EasyDiscuss features. (If there is any difficulty accessing that feature, please let me know so that I may get it working.)
News Flash: I didn't learn everything I needed to know in grade school, high school, or college. Neither have I achieved my early intentions of becoming a polymath by reading all the Great Books of the Western world and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Thus it is no surprise that as I teach a broad category of subjects, I often find myself lacking the knowledge of details which I would like to share on various subjects with my students.
One pleasant way I have found to fill in the gaps is the wide variety of subjects offered by The Great Courses. At first, I bought their DVDs which are often on sale -- or found them at Half Price books or on eBay. But then I discovered that as an Amazon Prime member I could have access to a growing number of these videos online for a $10 per month subscription - and I don't have to add more shelves in the TV room. Amazon even offers a free 7-day trial of the collection.
I also have tried the writing course on MasterClass.Com in order to gain some perspective apart from just trying to gather lesson plans and methodologies. If the classical Lutheran education thing doesn't work out for me, I may consider taking the Steven Martin course on stand-up comedy.
Students may be in a hurry to complete an assignment in which they are not interested. They may be lazy or they may simply not know what plagiarism is -- but plagiarism is serious business. It can get a student expelled from a university or cause a person to be dismissed from a significant position, as might be demonstrated in these plagiarism facts and stats.
Perhaps the best time to teach about plagiarism is the first time students are taught to write a research essay or book report -- especially if they are also taught how to do research on the internet.
Surfing the internet, one can find some helpful graphics depicting the full spectrum of plagiarism offenses. One may request a free poster on plagiarism as illustrated in this infographic.
Another helpful site with numerous free resources is sponsored by Turn It In, a subscription-based service which many university professors use to check for plagiarism in the work of their students. And at Plagiarism.org, one may find podcasts such as Teaching About Plagiarism with Help from Dr. Seuss
There are lesson plans for Teaching Students to Avoid Plagiarism, and while not specifically touted as such, I think Andrew Pudewa's Institute for the Execellence of Writing (IEW) method of summarizing articles is rather helpful in this regard.
Do you have a list of words for which you'd like definitions, but would rather not have to look up each word individually? Then, the free online version of EasyDefine could be just the thing.
Have you ever taught a literature unit where the author used many words which might be unfamiliar to your students? VocabGrabber might be a big help, especially if the text is in public domain, found on such sites as Project Gutenberg.
A teacher can select and copy an entire chapter of text from the book (up to 100 pages) and paste it in VocabGrabber (https://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/). VocabGrabber will create a list of words likely to be challenging to students, and let the teacher pick from those words as to which would be saved in a list. The option exists to include the word in the sentence where it is used in the book.
Those particular features may require teachers to subscribe for about $20 a year -- and the interface isn't especially easy to cut and paste into a Word document. However, there is another free version which produces similar results found at Vocabulary.com (https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/vocabgrabber).
Note: Teachers might also like Vocabulary.com to create spelling and vocab lists for their classes each week -- such as lists which incorporate words actually found in contemporary news items and journal articles. The subscription site also provides online testing of the various word lists. And don't forget such resources as SpellingCity.com and Quizlet.com to help your students practice their words.
I'm told that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) contains around 600,000 entries. While nothing can surpass the OED as an authoritative resource, the website OneLook.com references 18,955,870 words indexed from 1061 dictionaries.
This can be especially helpful for students working on poems and other composition exercises.
Additionally, there is even a "Reverse Dictionary" feature which can help you find the mot juste simply by describing a concept and then it returns a list of related words.
Examples of OneLook.com searches
bluebird Find definitions of bluebird
blue* Find words and phrases that start with blue
*bird Find words and phrases that end with bird
bl????rd Find words that start with bl, end with rd, with 4 letters in between
bl*:snow Find words that start with bl and have a meaning related to snow
*:snow or :snow Find words related to snow
*:winter sport Find words related to the concept winter sport
**winter** Find phrases that contain the word winter
expand:nasa Find phrases that spell out n.a.s.a.
What's the difference between synecdoche and metonymy? Where might one find examples to teach the various literary devices such as personification, hyperbole, and alliteration? Give these a try:
TED lectures run the gamut from liberal to conservative. One can even find some lectures on classical education. You may enjoy watching What If Everyone Had a Classical Education? There are also numerous YouTube videos which may provide some grist for your mill like Classical Education vs. Common Core.
I've used various resources to teach vocabulary over the years such as Vocabulary from Classical Roots (noting the Greek and Latin morphologies of the English language) and Wordly Wise 3000. I've made up my own weekly assignments, sometimes letting each student pick a word from the free 5000 word SAT vocabulary list.
Lately, I've been making use of Vocabulary.com which provides pre-made lists using words from current news articles in their "This Week In Vocabulary" collections (though they also have any number of other collections ranging from World Series baseball terms to helpful poetry terms.
The website offers (for a small fee) the ability to educators of providing practice, quizzes and spelling bees for the students. While the grade-recording is a bit cumbersome, it can still help free up some time for other things a teacher must prepare and supervise.
However, as I learn the website, I found an even more impressive tool within. I've often wanted to teach vocabulary based on the literature I am having the class to read.I believe that reading literature is one of the best ways to grow a vocabulary - if one bothers to keep a dictionary close at hand while reading.
I have, in the past, slogged through chapters, underlining every word which I thought might be unintelligible to students and typed my own vocabulary lists and exercises. Very time-consuming.
But then I find that one can cut-and-paste an entire chapter into the "Create a New List" Vocabulary.com feature . . . and the site automatically creates the list for me! Marvelous! This will be especially helpful as we take up the novel Frankenstein once more. Give it a try with anything from The Scarlet Letter to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians.
I once had a parent ask me why I had our 7th and 8th grade students reading literature which the local public high school students were reading in their sophomore year (with the implication that I was expecting too much from the students in my class). I responded by asking the parent why the high schools were using middle school texts to teach literature at the high school level.
I was not intending to be glib. The Huffington Post, for example, treated the same question in the article "American High School Students Are Reading Books at 5th-Grade-Appropriate Levels."
Can parents and teachers rely on anything more than "trial-and-error" when selecting literature which matches the reading ability of their children and students?
Some may turn to the reading lists of various classical schools and recommended curricula, but they might also ask how such lists were compiled.
Those who follow such lists may find that the literature ranges from too simplistic to too challenging only after having attempted them. If a book doesn't work out, one has to deal with wasted money and effort pursuing literature which did not satisfy. It would be nice if one could determine the readability of an appropriate text for a particular age level prior to buying the text and embarking on preparations to digest it.
Enter the world of readability metrics. In a world which approaches reading from the perspective of science rather than art -- and which imagines that statistics and data can improve everything -- it is no surprise that the act of reading has come under the digital scrutiny of measurable quantification as can be evidenced in the results of standardized testing.
If you wish to dabble in this area, you might check out this presentation given at an American Library Association (ALA) conference which explains various "online calculators" and databases for finding books. Detailed explanations of readability formulas may also be found online such as this one which describes the Flesch-Kincaid scale.
You might even consider report of the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governor's Association regarding Common Core's "New Research on Text Complexity."
Or if you would simply like to experiment with matching book levels to reading ability, you might try the Lexile Bookfinder or the Accelerated Reader Bookfinder. You can even find Lexile indicators on Amazon (see the left-hand column). See how Barnes and Noble has adopted and incorporated the Lexile framework.
If a child participates in such standardized tests as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) or the NWEA's Measure of Academic Progress (MAP), the teacher test coordinator can probably get the Lexile, AR, or Flesch-Kincaid reading level numbers for that child so that parents or teachers can use them.
In my own experience, the readability scales are not foolproof or entirely reliable. For example, my middle school students claim to have more difficulty reading Captains Courageous which has a Lexile score of 850L than The Trumpeter of Krakow which is rated at 1200L. (The reading levels in my current class range from 465L to 1355L which makes things interesting.)
I still make reference to such scales in an attempt to match books to readers, even though, after teaching literature over the past twenty years, I have a pretty good feel for the difficulty levels of various books for my students. The only problem is: I have not been able to quantify such feelings with statistical metrics.
If your school has a website maintained by someone you know, you might enjoy adding some free content using FreeDictionary.com. Other educational widgets are also available with a bit of "Googling."
This link has examples of what the blocks can do on the left-hand side and the HTML code in the boxes on the right. You can easily use these, for example, to look up all the words which end in "-able" and all the words ending in "-ible" to make a comparison. There are vocabulary activities and this-day-in-history resources as well.
Students in my classes have responded well to Nathaniel and Hans Bluedorn's The Fallacy Detective and The Thinking Toolbox.
The books are available at a discount to Christian schools -- and some of the web resources include a Short List of Fallacies and How to Use The Thinking Toolbox in a Classroom.
Catherine Duffy has a critical review here.
"Wow! What's THAT?" I exlaimed to my wife (who teaches Grades 1-2). She was working on a jigsaw puzzle of a map of the Nile delta with 3D figurines of Egyptian architecture . . . and scanning them on her phone for multimedia connections!
National Geographic has produced a series of 4D cityscape puzzles (3D + time dimension) for Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome - as well as Paris and Chicago!
The 4D Cityscape puzzles are affordably-priced and might make a wonderful gift or activity for students during the summer or during the school year.
Occasionally, when looking to give examples of vocabulary in context for SpellingCity lists (many of the example sentences there are poor) or Vocabulary.com or creating a quiz, I make use of two sites:
and
CAVEAT: Because these two sites have random ads on their pages, I do not recommend them for student use.
I tend to take an eclectic approach to curriculum development rather than relying on any single series. I have enjoyed and grown in my teaching abilities by purchasing, working through, and adapting materials like Andrew Pudewa's Institute for the Excellence in Writing, Andrew Kern's The Lost Tools of Writing, and Classical Writing by Lene Mahler Jacqua and Tracy Gustillio.
There are also online resources such as The University of Wisconsin - Madison's Writer's Handbook and
Vocabulary ought not merely be associated with tedious assignments; Words are fascinating! I have grown in my vocabulary primarily by reading literature and listening to lectures, but I have also learned by playing with words: Scrabble, Crosswords, Jumble, Balderdash, and more.
When students complete their assigned work early (and well), I encourage them to put their minds to work on something constructive. One way to do this is to make use of some online word activities. Here are a few to get you started:
Mad Takes (like Mad Libs)
