Beat the Monday Morning Blues

Here is a beautifully descriptive sentence from Lois Lenski's Newberry Honor book, 
Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison:

Like falling leaves blown by a gust of wind, the children slipped noiselessly into the underbrush and disappeared.

Rewrite this sentence three times using synonyms for: 
blown, noiselessly and disappeared.

Please send me some of your sentences in the comments section.  I'd love to read them!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Today let's try this sentence from Mark Twain's 
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:  


Then conscience gained a truce, 
and these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep.



Rewrite this sentence three times using synonyms for: gained, inconsistent and pirates.

A Sentence for Spring

The slimy snail trailed silver goo across the green leaf.

photo from WallpapersWide

Rewrite this sentence three times using different synonyms for: slimy, trailed and green. 

My Kid's Favorite Silly Sentence

Whenever we do sentence rewrites my kids remind me of this silly one I made up for them two years ago. Words that convey startling or vivid images leave an impression!

The angry woman threw her purse at the fleeing robber.

Rewrite this sentence three times using synonyms for: angry, threw and robber.

Can you tell why my children thought this sentence was so humorous?  

A sentence a day to explode your vocabulary!  

Every day we will take a sentence from a literary classic (or my imagination) and rewrite it three times using synonyms for three of the words.  Grab your handy thesaurus and let's get started.

"At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms- clasping himself, as if to hold himself together-  and limped towards the low church wall."  (Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens)

First step:  read the sentence several times for comprehension and to get a feel for the language.
Next:  look up three synonyms for each of these words in the sentence: shuddering, clasping, limped.
Finally:  rewrite the sentence replacing these words with a different synonym three times.

Challenge yourself or your students to find unfamiliar words and make them your own.  Be zany!  Be silly.  But whatever you do, don't be boring.