The general purpose of Vocabulary Continuums is to help students and English Language Learners develop a stronger sense of vocabulary by building knowledge of shades of meaning within similar words.A student might be able to determine that hot and cold are opposites, but where would freezing or boiling fall in that scale of opposites? There are not always exact opposites, and things might fall in several categories of meanings. If you were to arrange all of these temperature words on a continuum, much like a mathematical number line, you might group frigid and freezing close together, but have chilly as a little closer to the middle of the line toward warm, although it is certainly not a word meaning hot.Vocabulary Continuums offers a variety of sorting and organizing tools and graphic organizers great for doing exactly these types of vocabulary exercises. In that way, students learn not only synonyms and antonyms, but also shades of meaning!