Teachers: Free Student Texts & Teacher Guides
Stories of Words: Music
May 15, 2017
Music has its own set of words. Some words are used in other areas of life, but have very specific meanings in music. These words include notes, staff, and scale. Then there are words that are unique to the subject of music, such as aria.
Sports
January 12, 2017
To play is to do something fun. Adults and children all around the world play. Some people play a sport by themselves, like running a marathon. Others play sports on a team, like on a soccer or water polo team.
Stories of Words: Clothes
December 27, 2016
Many people like to wear the latest fashions. Fashion is a style of clothes, items, or ideas that is popular at the moment. Fashions change frequently. Words are needed to describe new trends. When those trends are no longer popular, people stop using the words. Like fashions, words, too, go into and out of style.
Stories of Words: Transportation
June 28, 2016
Have you ridden a bike? Have you been a passenger in a boat, car, train, or airplane? If so, you’ve used transportation. When new forms of transportation are invented, we often invent new words to describe them or give existing words new meanings.
Stories of Words: Arabic
March 3, 2016
You may think that most of the Arabic words that came into English refer to animals and customs that are unique to countries in northern Africa and the Middle East, where Arabic is the primary language. But you’re in for some surprises, too. You might be using words with Arabic roots every day to describe the world around you.
Stories of Words: Flight
January 1, 2016
Since the earliest times, people have looked up to the stars and wanted to travel there. They saw birds flying and tried to build machines that would help them fly, too. Legends tell of people who used wax wings or kites to attempt to fly. These attempts, of course, did not end well. Over hundreds of years, people built kites and boomerangs that were inspired by how birds glide through the sky. Only in the last few hundred years, though, did people have the technical skills needed to build flying machines. Once flying machines became real, new words were needed to describe them.
Animals
December 14, 2015
All around the world there are big animals, small animals, and all sizes in between. Mammals, fish, birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians, and other critters are all animals living on Earth. Let’s take a look at some of the core vocabulary words describing the types and characteristics of animals.
Stories of Words: Names
October 29, 2015
What’s your name? Maybe you were named for your mom or dad, or for someone else in your family. Many families name babies after an older relative to honor him or her and to carry on the person’s name. Sometimes places and things are named in this way, too—to honor a person or event, or to keep an important memory alive. Words like this, in which people’s names are used to form new words, are called eponyms. Eponym is a Greek word that means “to give one’s name to something.”
All About Books and Other Written Texts
October 20, 2015
There are many types of written texts, and what you find inside of each one may be different.
Stories of Words: Chinese and Japanese Words
September 17, 2015
Both the Chinese and Japanese languages have more than one system of writing. This means that there could be more than one way to write the word hello! Because the writing systems used in these languages are quite different from the one used in English, some words are spelled in a few different ways. This often happens when people try to spell a word from another language the way it sounds in their own language.