School’s almost out. We helped you engage your students during the year, and now we’re here to help your students fight the summer slump. You can assign these activities alongside summer reading, or simply allow your students to choose one or two fun options from these summer activities. Read on to learn more about assignment suggestions, from a summer vocabulary goal to a Week in Rap log.

10 Flocabulary Summer Assignment Ideas

1. Keep a Week in Rap Log

We’ll be continuing The Week in Rap throughout the summer for the first time ever this year. To keep up on the news, students can do a 10 minute assignment…

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Eleven Word Up Vocabulary Songs About Imagination and Fantasy!

Fantasy books are frequently at the top of kids’ lists. But what about songs that take kids to worlds of fantasy? Here at Flocabulary we love to mix up our vocab words in fun songs that get kids bouncing along and learning. These eleven songs about imagination at different graded reading levels will stretch your students’ imaginations and their vocabularies.

The Songs

Kindergarten and 1st Grade Vocabulary:

Do You Want To Fly?
Here’s a song about Tameka Potts who dreamed of flying on golden wings. Find out if the dream came true!

2nd Grade Vocabulary:

Fly Over America
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Review the Biggest Buzzwords of the Week!

When you follow national and worldwide affairs, you get access to stock plunges, shaky job markets, co-ed sports and more. Each week, we 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

probe (noun) — a penetrating or critical investigation

Why it matters? In recent negotiations, the UN probed Iran for signs of secret atomic-weapons technology development.

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In our most recent newsletter, we asked you to help us choose which literature song to write and record next. Well 105 of you voted, and picked a clear winner:

We’ll get started working on Frankenstein by Mary Shelley very soon. We can’t wait!

If you’re interested in how the voting broke down, you can see it here. Pride and Prejudice took a respectable second, but it couldn’t stand up to everybody’s favorite monster.

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…

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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?…

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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…

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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

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The postgraduates at South China Normal University who translated Hip-Hop U.S. History into Chinese!

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…

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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…

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