What word do students write again, and again, and again? Said.
I said. My mom said. We said. He said. She said.
Never is there an I mumbled. My mom cried. We clamored. He murmured. She exclaimed!
When they read, since they do not know a ton of words that mean said, their fluency, accuracy, and comprehension suffer.
I had to put a stop to it. As a class we decided it was time to lay SAID to rest. Said is DEAD.
I introduced the lesson by working it in with a book I was planning to read anyways. We had been building up to exploring text-to-text connections and character traits using The Three Little Pigs, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, and Porkenstein--in honor of Halloween!
(Get vocabulary cards for Porkenstein here--check my blog post on Word Work for ways to use them!)
The first time I read Porkenstein, I replaced every exciting word with "said" and made a great show of how BORED I was.
After that we discussed how knowing more words for said would improve our accuracy while we are reading and improve our writing by giving us juicier words to use.
Students were given sticky notes to collect better words for said while working at their Daily Five stations. We continued this activity over the course of a few days and shared a couple of words during our closing meeting daily.
In order to get the children excited I swapped out our Facebook bulletin board (check out that post here) to a cemetery scene.
I already had the black background up so I traced some tombstones on black construction paper and outlined them with oak tag. I wrote cute sayings on the black construction paper with chalk about said being dead.
My grandma--who taught first grade forever--gave me a bunch of goodies including a package of realistic looking paper leaves. So I scattered them all over my "cemetery" and added some cute clipart from http://www.mycutegraphics.com/ to complete the look.
I lined the edges with our acrostic poems about Autumn that students had written on paper decorated with autumn leaves.
It worked out perfectly--I got the board done while students were at their special, and they had a fire drill at the end...so we walked inside and right into our bulletin board. Their responses were priceless. They were even MORE excited about finding words to replace said with.
After giving the students time to collect words, we started sharing them and creating a list. I typed right onto the smartboard as the students called out words. We continued going around and around the room until they would not think of anymore. At the end we had collected 116 words!! (Last year my students only got to 60!)
Collecting the words took an entire mini lesson time slot but the kids LOVED it.
Then, for my next mini lesson, I took the list and divided up into 19 sections, I have 19 students, and assigned each student a number. Each student was responsible for copying over their words in black marker onto a ghost outline and cutting them out.
Then I gave students a reference list to add to their writer's workshop binders.
Check out our final product below!
Check back each month for the new word to bury!
