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April Round-up

3 Word Lists for April This month we looked at words ending in ‘re’, characters from Much Ado About Nothing for Shakespeare Day, and Easter vocabulary. How do you like your eggs in the morning? We continued our Easter celebrations in a 10 Words blog post with a twist. Do you prefer you eggs boiled or fried? Word for Wednesday: Pasta Made from a durum wheat dough which is shaped and boiled, pasta dishes originate in Italy and are now enjoyed all over the world. Learn about the words spaghetti, pappardelle, farfalle, and orecchiette. Commonly Confused Words: Fair vs. Fare Finally,...

How do you like your eggs in the morning?

To celebrate Easter week, we’ve got a 10 Words… blog post with a twist. How do you like your eggs in the morning? fried - a fried egg is cooked by cracking an egg into hot oil or butter in frying pan On Sundays I have fried egg and bacon for breakfast. sunny-side-up - a sunny-side-up egg is only fried on one side so the yolk remains a deep yellow colour and is runny She preferred her eggs sunny-side-up to over-easy. over-easy - an over-easy fried egg is flipped over so that the top is also cooked lightly She preferred over-easy eggs to sunny-side-up. soft-boiled - soft-boiled egg is boiled while still in its...

3 Word Lists for April

There are over a million word lists on Spellzone. Each one can be used in a variety of online and offline activities. Words ending in 're' In British English, the weak vowel ending is sometimes spelt with the letters 're'. Learn more about the differences between British English and American English in Unit 36. Easter Vocabulary Easter falls on April 17 this year. If you need a break from all the chocolate, why not spend some time testing yourself on these Easter vocabulary words? You can even practise them in our Easter Egg Hunt spelling game. Characters from Much Ado About Nothing April 23 marks ...

End of Spring Term Checklist for Teachers

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...

3 Word Lists for April 2021

Did you know there are over a million word lists on Spellzone? Every word list can be used in a variety of online and offline activities – learn more about them here. Here are 3 word lists to try in April: Easter Vocabulary April this year means Easter holidays! If you need a break from all the chocolate, why not spend some time testing yourself on these Easter vocabulary words? You can even practise them in our Easter Egg Hunt spelling game. Learn some eggy idioms for Easter here and about the words ‘chicken’ and ‘egg’ here. Words with Doubled Letters Our second word list this month is based around a spe...

Commonly Confused Words: Yolk vs. Yoke

Happy Easter! This week we have a themed post for our Commonly Confused Words series. Make sure you don’t say egg yoke when you mean egg yolk! What does each word mean? The yolk is the yellow spherical part of an egg. It is surrounded by albumen which is white. Click here for the full Spellzone dictionary definition of the word. Here is yolk used in some example sentences: Whenever he tried to fry eggs he always ended up accidentally breaking the yolk. I like soft-boiled eggs so I can dip my toast into the runny yolk. Click here to find the Spellzone vocabulary lists related to the word yolk. A yoke is a wooden restraint used to join two draft animals at...

Three Eggy Idioms for Easter

Happy Easter! If you need a break from all the chocolate, why not have a look at these eggy idioms and their origin stories? A bad egg A ‘bad egg’ is someone who is disappointing or a bad influence. Here is the idiom used in an example sentence: James fell in with a group of bad eggs who got him in trouble. The idiom certainly derives from the irritation felt when cracking an egg only to find it has gone off. One early use of the phrase is in this 1856 issue of the Milwaukee Daily American: "Mayor Wood is moving heaven and earth to procure his renomination. One of his dodges is, to get up letters in the newspaper, pretending to em...

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Around Easter time, this question gets asked a fair amount: what came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s a touchy debate. People often get wound up - so much so that the phrase ‘chicken-and-egg’ is sometimes now used to describe a situation where it is impossible to agree which of two connected things existed first, and which thing caused the other. Personally, I am adamant that the egg must have come first. You won’t be able to convince me otherwise. Except for in one particular circumstance – within the English language. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word ‘chicken’ comes from the Old English ‘cicen’ m...

Word of Wednesday: Easter

Easter, the holiday festival celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other European languages, the festival has names derived from Jewish Passover or ‘pesah’. In English, curiously, the name for this Christian festival has origins in Paganism. Easter or ‘Eostre’, in Old English, possibly relates to the Germanic goddess of spring by the same name or variant, ‘Ostara’. Venerable Bede, the first writer of an English history, suggests that the Pagan Eostre celebrations included eggs and hares. Perhaps these familiar symbols of Easter may have non-Christian origins. Considering hares are native to the British Isles; and rabbits or the Easter bunnies, were introduced by the Romans. Thes...

What came first?

In true Easter spirit our Word for Wednesday this week is the word ‘egg’. Eggs have been a consistent food source since the beginning of humanity. Throughout the history of the English language, the word ‘egg’ saw a handful of spellings before we settled on the Old Norse, ‘egg’. Let’s take a look at a few variations: Old English: ‘oeg’ or ‘eai’ Middle English ‘eye’ or ‘eyren’ The borrowed Norse ‘egg’ first saw popular use in northern England in the mid-fourteenth century and by the fifteenth century anyone wanting to buy ‘eyren’ might not have been understood at all. Interestingly, the word egg has a few other contexts other than its common noun form. You can ‘egg someone...