Using Vivid Words

This is an idea I stole from Pinterest.  I had pinned it a while back and never used it, but then when I was shopping for the canvas baskets at Lowe's, I saw the paint section and had a Pinterest flashback.  :)  I've been going through my writing material and filing things into my 6 Traits Organizer, seen here:

I admit that it was lazy of me to buy this instead of making my own, but sometimes it's nice not to reinvent the wheel.

In my organizer, I have this awesome book of graphic organizers:

It says that this book is for grades 2-3, but there are lots that you can use for first grade if you model it or use it during shared writing.  I put my organizer under the document camera and we filled it out together.

We have been reading Fancy Nancy and "collecting" fancy words in our mind.  To do this, we cover our ear when we hear a fancy word so that it can't escape our brains... it seems silly, but it's a good way for me to quietly see who is actually listening for the interesting words (expanding vocabulary for those who do the CAFE system).

Anyway, to transfer this to our writing, I used the Vivid Word organizer and the paint samples.  It really did help my kids to see how some words are "brighter/more vivid" than others.  It also got some of them excited to go to the store and borrow some paint samples!

Here's our handiwork:

The color of the paint even helped the kids to come up with words, like blue for sad.  We associated yellow with happy and red with mad.  They decided you can be a bit green when you are scared.  I thought they did a wonderful job with this!  The graphic organizer that we did together is saved on my computer at school, but this is the one that we did on the rug together first.  The one the kids wrote at their seats is in their binders to use as a reference for writing.  We chose more vivid words for said, went, and other overused words.  I can't wait to do more with this next week!