I Share, You Grab - Thesaurus Hunt

My students are encouraged to expand their vocabulary in my class. Not only do we have a new vocabulary word a week, I also have a bulletin board that celebrates my students' attempt at higher level vocabulary. Click HERE to see how I use this incentive bulletin board. In order to train my students to love words as much as I do, dictionaries and thesauruses are always visible and accessible in my classroom. This year, I also subscribed to Thinkmap's visualthesaurus.com. Part of the reason I love this website so much is because it gives a visual interpretation of how words are related. I also enjoy the fact that students can move words around; and specifically for my ELLs, each word can be pronounced for the students with a mere click of a button. Here is a screen capture of what it looks like. Notice that the right side of the screen indicates the part of speech of the words, in this case, I've looked up the word relate.

To help my students learn how to use these tools, I've created a worksheet that they can use. This year, it's just a sheet that I put in their center, but next year, I think I'll create a notebook for synonyms and high-value words. In the link below, I've put this FREEBIE in my Google Docs. It's called Thesaurus Hunt. See if there is anything else in the folder you find useful. Please comment and share this link if you found it helpful. 

It can also be found on TPT as a free download. Click on the image below to go to the product in my store. There are a few freebies there, but some great products for purchase. 

They're Here! Brainy Bottles Class Sets

Insomnia makes me super productive. I was able to put together the Brainy Bottle classroom sets and divide them by grade levels for you! All sets are available on TPT. The classroom sets include:

• Kindergarten - 1st (5 sets): Plural words, rhyming words, and syllable counts
• 2nd - 3rd (6 sets): Rhyming words, plural words, homophones, synonyms, and antonyms
• 4th - 5th (5 sets): Homophones, synonyms, and antonyms

Please visit my previous post for more details, including the bottles I love to use by a drink company called NEURO. There, you will also find a link to the dyed rice recipe I use. I've included two grade levels per set with differentiation in mind, and I hope you find that useful. Glad I could bring this to you so soon. Now, the question is.... sleep or Netflix? 

What's Developing: Brainy Bottles (A Hunt for Words)

Today, I want to share one of my favorite DIY classroom tools. I made these last year after seeing bottles in my mentor's classroom. As soon as I saw them, my urge to craft and create was awakened. I could think of tons of categories to make for the bottles, especially since I taught so many grades. This is exactly what I'm sharing with you today. You will also get a glimpse into my hoarding tendencies and love for the Neuro line of drinks. I digress.

I call these Brainy Bottles, and my classes have used them to find words and strengthen their language arts skills while experiencing a touch of kinesthetic learning. These are wonderful for centers and for partner work. The possibilities are truly endless, but I've created bottle sets for antonyms, synonyms, verb usage, homophones, rhyming, and plural words. For extension exercises, I have the students write sentences using (blank number of) words from the bottle or write new word pairs.

I get tons of inquiries on these perfectly eye-catching bottles when we've packed them up for conferences. I don't remember which came first - the love of the drinks that came in the bottles or the bottles themselves. They have certainly served a purpose for Brainy Bottles. NEURO DRINKS is the line of drink, and hopefully you can find them at your local convenient or grocery store. Any bottle will do, though, but I couldn't resist the colors of these.

Here is the link I used for coloring the rice. HOW TO DYE RICE. I prefer the neon food coloring colors over the primary colors, and for these bottles, they were a perfect match!

I'm putting up this freebie today for synonyms. I will put up complete sets soon. Keep your eyes peeled as I hope to run a contest so that one of my followers can win a full set, already-made! I love the drinks so much, that I have bottles waiting to be won!! Seriously, you have no idea how happy my husband would be if I got rid of a couple sets.

Happy crafting, and I hope you find uses for these bottles for years to come. You only have to make them once! I can't wait to hear how you do.