Here is a basic guideline for affect or effect that can help clarify how to use the two words correctly: It can be baffling to those whose first language is one other than English. This can be confusing to those whose first language is English. As I said, my students found the process to be a lot of fun and it was a great addition to our October festivities.Both of these words are verbs and nouns and their meanings overlap. You can get both of these activities for yourself by clicking on the pictures above. If your students are overachievers, and you fear them running out, simply paste a few more ghosts onto the slide before aligning them into a single pile. Of course, the piles aren’t truly never-ending, but since students were only required to do three synonyms per dead word (meaning a total of 24 synonyms), and there are about 40 ghosts in total, the chances of them running out are slim. I repeated the process with the second ghost (because I just had to have two different ghosts), and I had two “infinity” piles of ghosts students could drag and drop. I then selected all of the ghosts (easier for the first set since I could simply click ctrl+A), right-clicked on them, chose align vertically-middle, align horizontally-center, and they had all moved into a single pile. I simply chose my ghost (once again I was able to find the royalty-free clipart I needed on Pixaby), added a text box, grouped the two together, and copied/pasted it about 20 times. It turned out to be remarkably simple, one of those “Duh!” moments that I seem to be having so often these days. I’d seen other digital activity descriptions refer to them but hadn’t really thought about their creation. One of the things that most excited me about this project was it gave me a chance to create my first “infinity” draw piles. The graphic organizers appear on the following slides, one for each word, and are also in the background, with textboxes supplied for student notes. The example and tombstones themselves are in the background and thus protected from accidental (or not-so-accidental) editing. The basic concept is still the same and slide four (pictured above) has the eight tombstones, along with an example and a supply of ghosts already provided. I decided to use one of my favorite programs: Google Slides. This year our October celebrations are online so I wanted to develop a digital version of the activity.

Everything was eventually combined into one bulletin board under the title of “Word Cemetery Where Dead Words Rise As Synonyms.” The students loved it and actually started using some of the synonyms on occasion! The administration thought it was great too and specifically commented on how clever it was after a walk-through. They then listed one synonym on each ghost (a minimum of three was required) and decorated those as well. In groups (based on the word from their organizer), the students designed the tombstone listing the overused word as the name and the part of speech as the relationship. After completing the graphic organizer, they were able to use it as payment for a tombstone and ghosts. Thus the graphic organizer had the overused word in the center, a place for synonyms at the top, and the bottom included sections for three different sentences: a sentence from the book using the word, an improved book sentence (students replaced the overused word in the book sentence with one of the synonyms), and an original sentence using a different synonym for the overused word.Įach student received a different graphic organizer (a total of eight words were represented). I wanted them to get practice using a thesaurus, but I didn’t want to totally remove the context of the vocabulary words (see previous posts on ELL accommodations and vocabulary activities for more on why). I started by creating a graphic organizer for the students to complete. Since we were also in the process of reading Cam Jansen The Mystery Haunted House, I decided to tie the two activities together, but the book is incidental to the activity, and you can use either of these activities without reading the book. One October, I decided to involve the students in creating a bulletin board for our Halloween / Dia De Los Muertes celebrations. However, this does not mean that they shouldn’t be learning new words, and we spend a lot of time on synonyms in my class. This is normal, and I generally don’t have a problem with it. As English language learners, my students typically have a smaller vocabulary than their peers.

To get smaller synonym