2019 Blog Round Up

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So here we are… the last few day of 2019. Some of you will be wondering where the year went, while others will be looking forward to wiping the slate clean and setting some goals for the new year. We’ll share some ideas for New Year’s spelling goals next week – for now, here’s what we got up to in 2019:

We began the year by sharing five challenges for 2019. Did you have a go at any of them?

As usual, we expanded our Commonly Confused Words series. This year we looked at: allude vs. elude, assume vs. presume, bath vs. bathe, biannual vs biennial, biweekly vs. fortnightly vs. semi-weekly, click vs. clique, discreet vs. discrete, enquire vs. inquire, for vs. fore, vs. four, perspective vs. prospective, precede vs proceed, and waist vs. waste.

As a resource for our students who are learning English, we continued sharing definitions of popular idioms in the English language. This year we looked at idioms about the four elements earth, water, air, and fire. We shared idioms about numbers for National Pi Day and idioms about pies for National Pie Day. We made a list of idioms about dogs. We looked at idioms used to describe people (part one and part two).

In 2019, we also launched a new blog feature called 10 Words. In each post we chose a word and shared 10 other words you could replace it with. The feature is aimed at both people who are learning English and people who are looking to expand their vocabulary. So far we’ve shared alternatives to the words hello, angry, happy, and hardworking. We also shared 10 different ways to greet someone at Christmas.

Over the year we marked and celebrated a variety of occasions. On National Clean off Your Desk Day we share tips for creating a productive workspace, on Chinese New Year we shared words borrowed from Chinese languages, and on National Grammar Day we shared our favourite grammar tips. We shared idioms about the heart for Valentine’s Day, spooking spelling lists for Halloween, and wintry word lists for Christmas.

We took a look at American English and shared 60 American English words and their British English counterparts.

We looked at words that originate from peoples’ names and words that are hard to pronounce.

To help out our students, we shared tips for making the most out of Spellzone and tips for using Spellzone in the classroom. We also looked at long vowel sounds.

After a long break, we relaunched our Word for Wednesday feature and looked at the origins words including cappuccino, emoji, and tinsel. You can find all our Word for Wednesday posts in the blog archive.

Finally, we are thrilled to announce that in 2019 Spellzone was certified for high educational quality by Education Alliance Finland and the site was proven to promote learning efficiently. You can read more about our new certification here.

Are there any subjects you would like us to look at in 2020? Let us know and we’ll do our best to include them! From all the team at Spellzone, Happy New Year!

31 Dec 2019
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2019 Blog Round Up

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