Welcome to “Word Sense.” When I was an elementary teacher, my students and I would celebrate when they showed number sense– not getting the right answer but understanding how math works. One day during our daily poetry sharing, a student chose to read a poem from Mary O’Neill’s Hailstones and Halibut Bones.  Another student commented, “Ms. Durham, you know how you always talk about number sense?  Well, I think Mary O’Neill has word sense.”

That was many years ago.  But I will always remember how perfectly that third grader “got” poetry.  This website is devoted to words that help us make sense of our lives, our world, each other, in ways that only some kind of art can.