Check out the lyrics and more for Test-Taking Vocabulary.

At the end of the school year, schedules get weird, students get loopy and the activities that hooked kids all year suddenly aren’t working anymore. Whether you’re reviewing for finals or rewarding your students for a year of hard work, we’ve got a Flocabulary activity for you.

Ten End-of-year Flocabulary Activities

1. Review Test-Taking Vocabulary

Prep for final exams with our test-taking vocabulary song. The song defines key words like “compare,” “identify” and “infer” that students will likely see in the questions on their upcoming tests. Once the song is complete, click…

Keep Reading

Review the Biggest Buzzwords of the Week!

When you follow national and worldwide affairs, you get access to fallen politicians, broken records, athletes getting educated and more. Each week, we’ll highlight the top buzzwords or terms that your students might not have known or even heard until now. All these words are featured in the most recent edition of The Week in Rap. And once students beef up their vocab, the news will make a lot more sense.

THIS WEEK

Socialist (adj) — one who believes in the principles of Socialism, a system by which the State, or central government provides equal services for all individuals.

Why it matters?…

Keep Reading

Check out the lyrics and more.

We spent a long time thinking about grammar while we were working on our 16 new grammar songs, including our Prefixes song above. It quickly became clear that for some, grammar is a dirty word, conjuring antiquated scenarios of sentence diagramming and homonym horrors. But for others, grammar wasn’t scary…it was fun and wacky and not-so-hard.

We did our best to associate with that latter camp. And we wanted to create a forum for teachers to share pain-free, fun and creative ways to teach grammar. So on Monday, May 14 at 7pm, we’ll be hosting…

Keep Reading

A Lesson Plan With Twitter to Kick
Your Passive Voice Habits

Stop writing in the passive voice, and use strong verbs to make your sentences jump! Knowing the difference between active and passive voice can change the quality and strength of writing. This lesson teaches the definitions of active and passive voice, and lets students to practice converting passive to active voice with a fun Twitter activity.

The Lesson Plan

1. Define active voice, define passive voice, and introduce the difference between active and passive voice.

Key points:

• Sentences in the active voice have the subject before the verb.
• Sentences in the passive voice

…

Keep Reading

Have you ever thought, “Gee, I love Hip-Hop U.S. History, but I really wish Flocabulary would offer it in Chinese”? Well, today is your day.

Last December, we received an email from Isabella, a Chinese postgraduate from South China Normal University. A professor had given her a copy of Hip Hop U.S. History, and Isabella and a group of her fellow students became eager to learn more about Flocabulary. As the group began to study how Flocabulary worked, they decided that they wanted to spread it as a resource in China. But there was…

Keep Reading

JoDee Luna and her students have been wowing us for awhile. We first got to know JoDee when she was among the first teachers to try out The Word Up Project in her school district. With her above-and-beyond teaching skills and passion, she’s been getting pretty amazing results right from the start. JoDee sent us a few examples of her creative Word Up lessons and student examples, and we recently featured one entrepreneurship lesson on this blog (and on our office wall.)

We’ve known for awhile that JoDee’s strategies would help other educators in our community use Flocabulary in a more effective and fun way. And so we’re…

Keep Reading

Flocabulary makes creative writing fun. You can include writing prompts into weekly Flocabulary activities as a supplement to other exercises. This lesson introduces a creative writing prompt for “They Look Like Us,” a song about an alien invasion from The Word Up Project: Level Yellow (7th Grade). It includes some student samples below to help students get inspired. You’ll see how even struggling literacy students can become creative when empowered by Flocabulary.

The Lesson Plan

Materials: Access to “They Look Like Us” at Flocabulary.com, Flocabulary words and definitions, student examples, paper, pencil, and imagination.

1. Play “They Look Like Us” and complete…

Keep Reading

There are lots of principals out there. And there are lots of rappers out there. But rhyming principals? Seem crazy to you? Well it’s time you met Mervin Jenkins. Or Spectac, as we call him in the studio.

Mervin is both an emcee and a former middle school principal. As an artist, he’s recorded albums with Big Daddy Kane and 9th Wonder, and you can hear him on our Motion, Hamlet and European Middle Ages tracks. As an educator, he has been a principal and an assistant principal in North and South Carolina.

We’ve been working together for years, and we’re excited to tell you about…

Keep Reading

Review the Biggest Buzzwords of the Week!

Watch The Week in Rap now.When you follow national and worldwide affairs, you get access to human rights activists, major sporting events, felony charges and more. Each week, we’ll highlight the top buzzwords or terms that your students might not have known or even heard until now. All these words are featured in the most recent edition of The Week in Rap. And once students beef up their vocab, the news will make a lot more sense.

THIS WEEK

insurgency (noun) — an instance of rebellion

Why it matters? Sudan had declared a state of emergency in areas bordering South Sudan due…

Keep Reading

The end of standardized test season is finally here! (Or near.) Whether you think standardized tests are a good idea, or would rather be using your prep time for more creative ventures, the reality is that right now students are required to take them. So we commend the teachers who are going the extra mile to make the process as tolerable as possible. Some of these teachers even made it seem–dare we say–fun.

And lucky for us, these test-taking motivation escapades were caught on video. Watch educators perform their own version of “Party Rock Anthem,” surprise students with a flash mob, and even permit students to…

Keep Reading