Vocabulary University®
http://www.vocabulary.com

Vocabulary University® is a unique website.  Here’s a site which started a little more than five years ago, by the husband and wife team of Jan and Carey Cook, where all the content is created by them without any advertising and only one sponsor. Jan concentrates on the development of content and responses to all email inquiries and Carey designs the graphic puzzles and brainstorm searching for new ideas.  It is a true labour of love and shows what a compassion for education can accomplish!

The educational content featured on the site include grade level interactive word puzzles that help expand one's vocabulary (starting with High Elementary - 5th grade - through College Prep). There are also Rooty*Hoot*Hoot® brand puzzles using Latin & Greek roots, synonyms, antonyms and analogies.

Puzzles include Fill-in-the-Blanks, Definition Matching, Synonym & Antonym Encounter, Word Find, Crossword and a new feature, True or False? Each free session has three levels. Each level has 3 puzzles with 12 words each (36 total words in a session) and contains 7 additional activities/exercises that help develop vocabulary. There are 22 sessions with grade level appropriate roots/cells derived from Latin or Greek.

There are also sixteen special thematic features created over the school year (that teachers can request by e-mail) including Halloween, Thanksgiving, Wizard Words (inspired by Harry Potter), Monsters, Holiday Traditions, Valentines, Earth Day, Shakespeare, and Baseball.

Teachers can also access lesson plan vocabulary exercises (two Latin roots, a word bank and 3 word puzzles), vocabulary from 54 upper elementary and high school recommended texts such as Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Great Expectations, Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone To Kill a Mocking Bird, word city root words which uses a graphical approach to learning vocabulary, an archive of past puzzles and more.  This site is a great resource for teachers to build up student vocabulary.

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