'Tis the season for festive word lists! Whether you're dreaming of sugarplums or perfecting your pronunciation of ‘Joyeux Noel’, let's unwrap the gift of language together! Here are our 3 word lists for December 2023… Christmas Words Improve your holiday vocabulary and explore seasonal gems like mistletoe, nutcracker, and Yule with our list of Christmas words. Try our games to ensure you sleigh your way to improved spelling skills in time for the festivities! Christmas Food Indulge in the world of Christmas culinary delights! Perfect for English learners, our second list for the month covers festive food vocabul...
With Easter just a few weeks away, here is an end-of-spring-term checklist to help you get ready for the holidays: Reset the Spelling Ability Test End of term is the perfect point to reset the ability test. Your students will be provided with an updated pathway for the start of the new term and you will have a data point to help you map their progress. Compare each student’s end-of-term Spellzone Score to their start-of-term one to see how much they have improved. Look at your class results As well as exploring the results section for each student, you can look at and download the results for your class as a whole. C...
Our Word for Wednesday theme for December is Christmas decorations. A decoration is something that is used to beautify a space. The word comes from the Latin ‘decorare’. So far this month, we’ve looked at the words nutcracker, bauble, and mistletoe. With Christmas Eve just days away, what else could we choose for this week’s word but stocking? Stockings are long socks which are hung up by children on Christmas Eve in the hope that they will be filled with gifts. There is no record of the origin of this tradition and even today different households have different gift-giving rituals. In some families, stockings are filled e...
Many of us can’t get through the day without our caffeine fix, but how many of know the origins behind our coffee words? Today we’re going to take a look at five different types of coffee beverage and how they got their names. To learn more about the origin of the word ‘coffee’ itself, click here. Espresso Espresso is made by forcing steam through finely ground coffee beans. The word comes from the Latin ‘exprimere’ meaning ‘press out, squeeze out’. The rest of the coffees explored in this blog post are made using espresso as a base. Macchiato A macchiato is an espresso with a small amount of milk added to it. In Italian, the...
In the United Kingdom, this week marks Chocolate Week. For eleven years, chocolatiers, chocolate companies, hotels, bars, and restaurants have celebrated this delicious treat by hosting events such as talks, tastings, and demonstrations. At the end of the week, the celebrations conclude with The Chocolate Show London at Olympia National Hall. Find out where you nearest event is here. The word ‘chocolate’ dates back to around 1600, and comes from the Nahuatl ‘xocolatle’ (possibly from ‘xocolia’ meaning ‘to make bitter’ and ‘atl’ meaning ‘water’). Chocolate was originally a drink, and brought to Spain in 1520. By the 16...
Today we’re going to zoom out from specifically looking at the United States of America to taking a look at some English language words that have been borrowed from the indigenous languages of the Americas as a whole, from Alaska and Greenland to the southernmost tip of South America. Many of these words describe plants or animals that are from the Americas, whilst others may describe aspects or objects from Native American or First Nations day-to-day life (such as wigwams and igloos). In this post, though, we hope to look at some words whose origins might surprise you! Anorak When you think of British items of clothing, you probably think of wellies and anoraks long before you th...
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