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.