More English tools for our lessons: Thesaurus

Hello!

In this post I'm going to present a very interesting tool: Thesaurus. Have you used this tool?

Thesaurus is a dictionary of synonyms and antonyms. And it can be extremely helpful when we aim to increase our vocabulary or when we need to write a word several times and we don't want to repeat the same word. It is an excellent way to learn new words, the slight differences among them, and to know their antonyms as well.

For example, for this post, we have search the word: Exercise. Have a look at the results of our search:

As you can see, it gives us words such as action, activity, movement, which are directly related to our subject physical education. It also gives us synonyms such as schoolwork (the exercise of a book, calisthenics (related to a type of gym exercises) or discipline. On the other hand, is funny to see that it gives us some antonyms such as "fun" (the opposite of exercise is fun, which it is not entirely wrong) or rest. 
Moreover , if we scroll down, we'll see some synonyms of the closest words (action, activity), and therefore the learning cycle will never end. 

When will we use one or another word? Well, it will depend on the context, of course. Each word has a slightly different use, and it serves us and our students as a very powerful tool to learn when and how to use these words in their adequate context. It's the magic of a language!