How to Have a Happy Leap Year

I’ve been reading about superstitions surrounding Leap Year, and it seems that some folks associate the day with bad luck. I think Friday the 13th has already claimed the title “the day of bad luck,” so why not treat February 29 as a day of fun and opportunity? Here are some suggestions for making leap year…

Chicken-related Idioms and Proverbs

I had more fun this week with chicken-inspired ideas. My office window looks out on the front yard, and I keep seeing a chicken wandering around, so it’s no wonder the bird has found its way into my writing. If you’re looking for a fun lesson on idioms and proverbs, please consider using the eight…

Hitting the Books: Learning Idioms about Books and Reading

It’s been a while since I’ve posted materials on idioms. The interest in conversational expressions remains strong among online learners, however, so I recently decided to pick up the camera and talk about idioms and sayings related to books. This time around, I changed my approach in teaching this kind of vocabulary. In the past I…

Student Stumper 39: Can “that which” be used together?

QUESTION: Can “that which” be used together? ANSWER: Hmm. It can, but why does is sound odd to my ears? That was my first reaction to a student’s question. My clue was his source.  He encountered the combination in a scholarly work. The statement he quoted also made use of “ofttime,” which is recognized as…

Situations and Sayings: A communicative activity

Click here to listen to my introduction to the activity “Situations and Sayings”. Click to view my Situations and Sayings_handout. I wanted to offer a fun way to learn a small set of sayings about similarities and differences. They should be easy to understand because of the contexts they appear in, and I hope the…

Who Makes the World Go Round? An activity for quantifiers

Identifying types of people and their tendencies is an interesting way to practice quantifiers. Consider the activity below. Step 1 – Write this proverb on the board: It takes all kinds to make the world go round. As a class, discuss its meaning. Step 2 – Explain that students will be writing statements about different…

Redefining Live Instruction: Real-life Vocabulary Activities

In a recent vocabulary video lesson, I chose to highlight idioms and other conversational expressions, from window shopping to something speaking for itself. I do believe that ELLs need a steady diet of general and academic words, but I also think their vocabulary studies should include exposure to informal words and expressions. It’s not that…

The more practice, the greater one’s accuracy: Double comparatives for cause and effect

I’ve been asked to create a video on comparative adjectives for my YouTube channel. The request came from a viewer who wants to be able to construct sentences like the more, the merrier. Such a saying certainly can confuse a learner. We teach them that a sentence has a subject and a verb, but then…