204 in the Know

Today, I did my lesson on "How to Find and Replace Dead Words".  I had the students use this as the title for the notes they put in the lesson section of their daily journal.  First, I put up the paragraph below:

Today I took my big dog for a long walk.  My dog seemed happy to be outside.  We passed a little kitten.  My dog was happy when it saw the kitten.  After we played with the kitten we went to the park.  While at the park my dog swam in the cold water.  He was sad when it was time to go home.  My dog and I ran fast all the way to our house.  My mom had a big glass of lemonade ready for me and a cold bowl of water for my dog.

I read it out loud to the class making sure to yawn alot.  We then talk about what makes it so boring and circle them within the passage.  The children brought up words used more than once, dead words and boring or overused words.   Having made the Dead Word list already made the idea of replacing words simple.  While spending the year to develop the differences between editing and revising clarified that this process is for making our writing more interesting. 


After going through how to find our words, we review strategies for replacing them.  The children immediately call out some of the replacement words which fits in to my first method; we call it 'using our own vocabulary'.  We then think about a grammar lesson from the beginning of the year - proper nouns; we call this way 'being more specific'.  Then we look back at the Dead Words poster.  Next we tie back into the Six Traits by revising for word choice.  And finally, we review using a thesaurus or Snappy Words.  The actual notes the students took are listed below. 

The children are amidst their poetry projects right now.  This lesson was targeted to apply to the writing piece explaining the story of their favorite songs using the already located and color coded figurative language.  They have already written the story and what the song means to them or how the song makes them feel.  Today's independent practice for the taught skill was to find five words within their written pieces to revise using the taught strategies.