A Funeral for "Dead" Words

As much as I prefer full-time teaching to subbing, I have been able to glean many a good idea from my subbing experiences! This is one that came from a fourth grade class that I was eager to use with my 5th and 6th graders in private school.

To encourage more interesting written work from my students, I came up with a list of words that were too commonly used in their writing (like, stupid, boring, fun, hate, said, and funny) and pronounced these words "dead."

A "headstone" was commissioned for each dead word, and students were required to put "flowers" on the headstones to pay their respects - on each Post-it note flower was a synonym for the dead word that they had found in the thesaurus. From that time on they were not allowed to use those words in their writings (and words like "stupid" they were also forbidden to say, since they had a bad habit of using this word to describe their fellow students).

They were extremely resistant to this activity at first, but it didn't take long before they started chuckling at the synonyms they were finding. It was not unusual for statements like "That's a dim-witted idea!" to be heard in our classroom after that.