Painting With Words

This lucky library find is word choice perfection. I often encourage my writers to use more specific color adjectives than just your basics. (Ex: fire engine red instead of red, sandy instead of brown, etc.) I explain that when they do this as authors, it's powerful. They don't even need illustrations because they're "painting with words!" Budding writers always seem motivated to try this technique at first. Colors are easy, right? Eventually though, their limited vocabulary and/or tendency to shy away from risk-taking often gets the best of them, and you see less and less of those vivid colors in their writing. By pairing Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger with plenty of modeling and mentoring, I'm hoping my future 4th graders will dilute the dullness and make "painting with words" a regular practice.

This book celebrates the beloved color GREEN!

Each 2-page spread showcases a unique shade of green.

Some are not what you'd expect.

The book leaves you with fresh adjectives to add to your vocabulary and a new appreciation for this lively color.

Once we read the book together, "painting with words" will be worked into our revising workshop. Rather than telling my students a new color to use, I'll question them to fish one out. If students claim they "don't know" the name of the color they're wanting to use, I tell them to think of something that is that color and make one up! (One of my all-time favorite student originals was "basketball orange!") Slam dunk!

No matter how hard we work as teachers to help our students improve their writing, it sure does help when published authors come through with solid gold green books like this one!

Word Choice Rejoice!

Word choice is a delicate, yet important thing in any piece of writing. It makes our writing colorful! I've gone on about "shades of meaning" in a previous post. I've found that my students are eager to use "razzle dazzle words" in their writing, but they need to actually understand the new words they choose to use before using them! Fourth graders also tend to focus more on sounding "fancy" than specific, and this is one of the habits I hope to change in my incoming group of fourth graders. With these goals in mind, I created a new tool for my writing traits toolbox:

CLICK HERE to download it from my TpT Store!

I hope this little activity will encourage our budding writers to build vocabulary, consider shades of meaning, and ultimately enhance word choice in their own writing! 

Writing Traits Posters for 2014

If you're like me, the holiday break gets you thinking about changes, updates, and renewed goals for the classroom. What worked well this semester? Who are the students I still need to reach? How will I reach them? It's almost as if teachers come up with their own New Year's resolutions just for school, which I think is very healthy and reflective! If one of your "school resolutions" is to stock up on new writing resources, I have something perfect for you! I have always been a fan of teaching the 6+1 writing traits, and I finally got around to creating my own posters. I hope there are some hardworking writing teachers out there who find them useful! Happy 2014!

Click HERE to download all 7 posters from my TpT Store!

Word Choice: Old vs. Ancient

This week our school is hosting a "Summer Enrichment Camp" that gives students the option of attending 5 shortened school days where they can get a head start into their new grade level. It's been nice to meet some of our brand new fourth graders, see my coworkers again, and start working on my room. I'm loving the new door sign I ordered from Fanciful Felt by Bourdiers on Etsy! I hardly ever shop online, but this was a must-have!

Since I knew I'd only have one week with my little group before school officially starts, I wanted to work on something that would get them excited about fourth grade writing. So, I decided to dedicate the whole week to word choice! We all know that kids' vocabularies grow as they get older, but how can we teach them to remember to use these wonderful words when they put pencil to paper? Giving students a list of vivid synonyms (we call them "razzle dazzle" words!) to replace worn out/overused words is easy for them and us, but I've found that a lot of my students tend to get "word drunk" once they rely too much on whipping out that word list every time they write. I'll emphasize how important it is for them to throw away worn out words and replace them with "razzle dazzle" words from their word list, and then I'll read sentences like this:

"I once helped an ancient lady put her groceries in the car."

Poor woman... I'd need help with my groceries, too, if I was several centuries old. "Elderly" would have been much more appropriate, but how was my student to learn this from a word list? We have to teach our budding writers that learning new words comes with time and if you write with "razzle dazzle" words that are completely unfamiliar to you, even if it "sounds cool," your writing will be formulaic, wordy, and maybe just downright offensive! I put together a word list that students can build on their own and update throughout the year as they learn new "razzle dazzle" words through reading, conversations, teachers, etc. They will be able to see different shades of meaning in synonyms and refer only to the "razzle dazzle" words that they're familiar with. Hopefully I won't be reading about anymore ancient ladies!

Click here to download it for FREE!

You might be wondering why I left out the word "said." I'm saving the "Said is Dead" theme for later on in the year when we work on adding more dialogue to our stories. "My Razzle Dazzle Words" pairs very nicely with Crickwing by Janell Cannon. She's also the author of one of my childhood favorites, Stellaluna.

This is now my #1 favorite mentor text for teaching word choice. If you can get past the fact that it's about a cockroach that plays with his food (gross), you'll find that it's jampacked with vivid verbs and adjectives like "scrambled," "chortled," "eensy," "brilliant," "stammered," "gasped," "howled," "insisted"... and the list goes on.

Thank you to Mrs. T from Teaching Mrs. T for nominating me for the "One Lovely Blog" Award! Most blogs I follow have this award and I just did a round of 20 nominations for other awards, so I want to wait a bit on nominating 15 more for this one. I hope you can forgive me! ; )