An article in today’s Education Week talked about a program called Word Generation that researchers in Boston developed to help middle school students learn academic vocabulary. The program is comprised of a series of daily fifteen minute lessons, and they all appear to be freely available on their site.

They seem like decent lessons, though I’m wary of “parachuting” daily lessons into a classroom that are not connected to the ongoing curriculum. I’m more inclined to using a standard template for short lessons that can be easily adapted and connected to the thematic units that are being used in class. It’s on my “to do” list to write more in-depth about our academic vocabulary lessons in a future post, and it’ll certainly be in a book I’m writing (with my colleague Katie Hull) that will be coming out next year.

That said, however, I also can’t blame busy teachers who might want to use what appears to be a high-quality series of free lessons that are all set to go.

The Word Generation site also has some other useful resources, including a page on Twelve Myths of Word Learning.

I’m adding the resource to The Best Websites For Developing Academic English Skills & Vocabulary.