I have to admit that I’m not a great fan of English as a subject. I never enjoyed it that much. That said, I recently came across two cool websites that can add a little fun into the subject.

National Punctuation Day is a website devoted to the love of punctuation. The day was celebrated on September 24, but it’s an annual celebration so start preparing now for next year. There’s suggestions about punctuation related activities including a punctuation baking contest.

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks  features all kinds of pictures of signs where quotation marks were placed when they shouldn’t have been. The comments beside the pictures are intentionally witty (sometimes a tad risque) and might require a bit of explanation for the average student. Even so, it’s a good resource for pictures of quotes that should be where they are, and an opportunity for the kids to explain why.

In the wake of the new president’s swearing in last week, I stumbled across an Innauguration Speech Generator. It’s a kind of a cool little Mad Lib style activity where you fill in adjectives, nouns and verbs and it pops them into the appropriate places in an Obama style speech. As an English activity it’s lightweight and fun.

As a Social Studies activity this one is neat, too, because the Mad Lib template is fairly standard for a political speech. It would be fun to analyze it, throwing in your own verb and adjectives, etc, and then compare it to other politicians’ speeches. There’s likely a surprising similarity between them. A lot of rhetoric is thrown around but how much substance is there?

Interestingly, because of the domain (atom.com) hosting the speech generator, it’s blocked at my school. Hopefully it works better in your neighborhood.

Over the weekend I discovered Save the Words which is a site that asks you to save old, outdated words. Every year new dictionaries come out and drop older, little used words. Think of the treasures we’re losing.

To help the cause I adopted oporopolist and promised to use it whenever I can. For example: “After school I need to get some bananas on the way home so I should stop at the oporopolist.” They also included a funky certificate to commemorate my attempts to save this word.

Adopting words would be a great project for any class from the youngest to the oldest. Looking through many of the words I didn’t find any that were improper, though teachers should pay attention as kids will find ways to put normal words to rude uses.

It’s a great take on vocabulary building that you can turn into an entertaining and thoroughly goofy activity.

How meaningful is language? How meaningful is it when it’s combined with a picture? The Ad Generator explores these questions by taking pictures and captions from real ads and randomly putting them together. The really odd part about the exercise is that, considering everything is random, more often than not the picture and caption actually make sense together. If you’re looking at the power of word in English, Marketing or a Business course, this site would be worth a look.

Have you ever known what an idea was, but not known the exact word for it? You know the definition, but not the term, and someone tells you to look it up in the dictionary. That, of course, doesn’t work.

OneLook.com has a reasonable dictionary site of their own but that’s not really that interesting since you’ll find there’s an awful lot of online dictionaries if you start looking. This site also boasts a reverse dictionary. You plug in a rough definition of the word you want, and when you press the button it’ll spew out a slew of words that approximately match your definition. The better matches tend to appear closer to the top of the list, and the worse ones closer to the end.

This is one of those great applications that show the Internet can sometimes make life simpler. After all, can you imagine any way that a reverse dictionary would work without a computer? It’d be pretty difficult.