The Flocabulary Blog

May 2, 2013
Flocabulary Team

Student Portmanteaus

Every week we have a new Week in Rap Shout Out Contest and give a shout-out to the winner on Friday. For this week's contest, we asked you to concoct a portmanteau, combining the sounds and meanings of two words. Flocabulary is a portmanteau, in fact. And you all really wowed us with your creativity this week – we received hundreds of inventive entries. Narrowing it down to just one winner was difficult work! In the end, the win goes to Andrew Carnegie Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois. They came up with the following portmanteaus: Lucrinite – Lucrative + Infinite…

Read on!

April 30, 2013
Flocabulary Team

Flocabulary & China

Check out what we stumbled upon in the library! It's our very own SAT Vocabulary book, with annotations in Chinese! Now, we do not in any way advocate writing in library books (We've got your back, librarians.), but we did think it was pretty cool that a Chinese speaker was studying up on English vocab using our SAT prep songs. You can explore additional ideas about using Flocabulary for English Language Learners. And the Flocab-China connection doesn't stop there! Remember last year's blog post on translating Flocabulary into Chinese? We were contacted by Isabella, a postgraduate student in China who wanted to…

Read on!

April 29, 2013
Flocabulary Team

Celebrating Librarians

Flocab had a great time last week meeting librarians at this year's Texas Library Association (TLA) conference. We learned a lot about the many duties of library media specialists! We want to celebrate their hard work, so we're writing a new song all about what they do. But for now, we'll let librarian Amy Fuller of Chapa Middle School (TX) explain what librarians do (and don't do!), in her own words: We recommend the perfect book for any and every reader. We facilitate book clubs. We give book talks. We host author visits. We teach research skills. We assist students with…

Read on!

April 19, 2013
blake

What happened to “ODWM”?

This week, we'll be replacing one of our US history songs with two new songs on Flocabulary.com. ODWM with be swapped out for two new units: Indian Removal and Jefferson vs Hamilton. This isn't the first time we've swapped out a song. In the case of our US constitution song for instance, we felt the original track wasn't up to our musical and lyrical standards. We're replacing ODWM for different reasons: because a few of our lines were being interpreted in ways that we didn't intend. Two lines in particular were often misunderstood. The first misunderstood line was: "We're talking…

Read on!

April 9, 2013
Flocabulary Team

6 New Flocabulary Videos!

...and even more coming all the time! [jwplayer file=http://flocabulary.s3.amazonaws.com/media/scientific-method-media.mp4 image=http://flocabulary.s3.amazonaws.com/images/scientific-method-image.jpg] One of our new videos, Scientific Method of Madness. This month, we have six new videos coming at you! As always, we have new Word Up videos (including SAT vocabulary!), plus a bit of Reading and Writing Strategies and Science for good measure. As always, we have even more videos in the works and coming soon! If you'd like to watch all of our videos, make sure to sign up for a free two-week trial to Flocabulary. New Videos Vocabulary 2nd Grade Vocabulary: You Don't Know Everything About Me Watch this video…

Read on!