Identify the unique personal attributes of your class members. Begin by viewing the Visual Thesaurus and discussing displayed attributes associated with famous American leaders. Using these identity maps as models, pupils generate nouns...

Looking for a game that teaches students about how to use a thesaurus, and reinforces the concept of synonyms? Each player will have the opportunity to use their "tools" in this engaging lesson. They will use their thesauruses in order...

Young poets get inspiration and guidance for making word association poems with the Visual Thesaurus. Your class could complete this project with nothing more than a pencil and paper as well. A nice one-off for a substitute during your...

Introduce the idea of a word and its synonyms having different degrees of meaning. Each individual chooses a word that he or she wants to work with and fills out the included worksheet using a thesaurus. Consider having a word bank of...

Pupils create trading cards for elements in the Periodic Table. Initially, they are introduced to the Periodic Table of Elements and the concept of elements in the world around us. After dividing into groups, learners use the Visual...

An extensive portfolio project encourages your kids to reflect on their personalities with multiple writing assignments. From activities on extended metaphors to writing about an important day in their lives, kids explore the way they...

Students, assessing a variety of formatting tools with Microsoft Word, utilize a bank of vocabulary words to make a personal dictionary of nouns. They classify nouns for people, places, things and ideas and separate them into common and...

Fifth graders review their writing for repetition of words at the beginning of the sentence.  In this informal writing lesson, 5th graders share examples of sentence beginnings.  Students use a thesaurus to find antonyms and...

Third graders express and interpret information and ideas. They identify a variety of feelings and their effect on people. They explain how someone's actions can cause someone else to have a specific feeling.

Third graders create a class A to Z Feelings book to explore emotions, discover new words, pose for a "feeling" icture, and write about the feeling.

Students make a mind web to describe their favorite soda. They then make thumbnail sketches of their labels. Tehy create a unique font with which to write the mane of their soda.

Students are assigned a separate species of plant or bird to research. Using a worksheet, they are responsible for finding a variety of information on their assigned plant or bird. They also complete a mini-poster and give an oral...

Students explore descriptive writing by creating headstones. In this memorial instructional activity, students utilize an 11" x 17" piece of paper to create a cemetery headstone memorializing a word rather than a person. Students...

Can colors help to convey a mood in writing? Explore this question with your class using the songs "Grey Street" by the Dave Matthews Band and "Blu is a Mood" by Blu Cantrell. After analyzing the effect of the color words in these songs...

Discover the Virtual Thesaurus with your class. They use the Virtual Thesaurus to assist them in an inquiry-based approach to discovering the meanings of some common Latin and Greek roots. Each child then teaches a particular root and...

Students perform an "autopsy" on a dill pickle to determine its' cause of death. After finding "clues" inside the "body," students organize facts and use their imagination to write an epitaph. As an alternative, students may view a...

Students create an acronym out of their name. They use a thesaurus and the computer to create it. They also add pictures to make it more creative.

Kids paraphrase an entry from The Elements of Style, and then revise a sentence. They use the Visual Thesaurus and find synonyms for the phrase very pretty, brainstorm a list of intensifiers (as alternatives to really and very),...

Fifth graders create synonym trees by writing their main word on the tree trunk and gluing synonym words to represent the leaves. In this synonyms lesson plan, 5th graders play a class game where they must find a partner who has a...

As your class finishes the novel Dragonwings, use these culminating projects. A vocabulary list is given for chapters eleven and twelve and either an epitaph or letter activity concludes the book. The final project consists of creating a...

Students complete online exercises for synonyms. For this synonyms lesson, students work in pairs to find pictures around the room and choose one as the music plays. Students write a word to describe the picture and discuss their...

Fifth graders write a paragraph titled "All About Me" in the computer lab after they have drawn graphic organizers to fill in background information about themselves and used a "10-Point Writing Checklist" to do peer editing.

Alliterative adjective nicknames generate stories inspired by Rosemary Wells' book Noisy Nora (also a thematic complement to any class with children who make a ruckus to get attention). Class members explore basic story elements --...

A terrific lesson on homophones awaits your youngsters. First, pupils access a website that contains lists of homophones. Then, it's time to get creative! Everyone gets a piece of poster board and they create a homophone cartoon -...