A More Exact Word

Each week I plan my lessons off of the stories that the students turn in.  This allows me to specialize my lessons to their needs.  I love the freedom this style of teaching gives me; we can focus on a subject until everyone is more comfortable with it.

This week we worked on transition words and ten cent words.  A ten cent word is a word that gives us basic information; "walked" would be a ten cent word.  "Walked" gives us a basic understanding of how the character got somewhere, but we could use a more exact word or dollarize the word.  Some of the words we came up with to replace "walked" were: shuffled, wobbled, strutted, rambled, staggered, flounced, reeled, shambled, minced, scuffed, roamed, strolled, plodded and ranged.  These dollarized words paint a more colorful picture of how our character got to her destination.

Next we worked on dollarizing our transition words.  A word that is overused in going from one scene to the next is "then". We worked on replacing "then" with other words that would paint a more exciting story.  Some of the words we came up with were: once, after, before, meanwhile, during, because of that, and finally.

The homework this week is to use sentences #11 and #26 as our opening or closing sentence to a story.  Either sentence can start the story, but the other sentence has to be the ending.  Students must use three forms of walked in their story. The word "then" is not allowed in this weeks writing.

Greek
dia-through
geo- earth
hypnos- sleep
helios- sun

Latin
sol-sun
luna-moon
trans- across
terra-land
dormio- sleep
annus- year