Vocab help

SATs Are Coming: Pay Attention and Increase Your Vocabulary

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With the SATs rapidly approaching on January 28, 2012, students need to be focused on the three bodies of material covered: vocabulary, math, and grammar. One of the best ways to quickly enlarge and deepen your vocabulary is to PAY ATTENTION to what you read and what you hear, noting—as in mentally noting and then writing down—any and every word you don’t know. Recently I was listening to the audiobook version of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson and was struck how, IN THE FIRST TWO MINUTES, I heard many words I teach over and over again for the […]

Quizlet.com: Fun, Free, and Effective

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I’m a self-proclaimed and sometimes evangelical technophile, but I’m willing to admit that twenty-first century educators can be guilty of using technology simply for the sake of using technology. Just because you can use computers to accomplish certain academic tasks doesn’t necessarily mean you should.  In some cases, old-fashioned technologies like paper and pen or—gasp!—paper and pencil are superior learning tools to laptops and the internet.  I discovered during my graduate studies that electronic devices are BEST used not when they simply replace old-fashioned technologies, but when they empower educators and students to teach and learn in ways that simply are not possible […]

Learning Vocab Long-Term

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If you’re like most students, you probably have little trouble memorizing vocab words for quizzes and tests.  The night before the quiz—be honest, sometimes the period before— you cram the words into your brain and you do just fine.  But three days later, they’ve somehow vanished from your memory, leaving you with that uncomfortable feeling the next time you encounter one of them (say, on the SATs) that you should know the word but it’s gone.  D’oh! So the question is, how do you learn words and NOT forget them?  Fortunately, there are several good tricks to this trade. First, while […]