Better Words For...

I know there are a lot of charts and pages out there that show lists of better words students could use in their writing, but always thought there must be a more visually pleasing way to display them out there somewhere. During my university degree we took a tutorial at Varsity Lakes School (on the Gold Coast, Australia). While there I saw a great (and colourful!) way of displaying better vocabulary for students. I have to apologise for not remembering the teachers name to give kudos but it was quite a while ago!! They were home-made and simple but very effective. Just the words cut out and glued onto coloured cardboard.
These are the ones I made- they are a bit different to the ones I originally saw. They are great for brightening up the room in a functional way :)

Also, apologies for the quality of some of the photos, the lights created a bit of glare on some of them from the angle I was taking the photo...

Better words for feelings:

Better words for big:

Better words for happy:

Beter words for said:
 

Better words for nice:

I also made one for high modality word as we were writing persuasive texts at the time I made these:

The Writing Process

I wanted to create a way to visually show my students the writing process and came up with a giant pencil! I know a lot of other teachers have used the same idea in their classrooms and I think it is really effective. I decided to add a little more information than usual to my writing process to help my students work independently (they have a tendency to ask questions they already know the answers to! This way, they have no excuse to be asking me anything, especially while I am conferencing with another child).

I also decided to add pegs with the student's names to my pencil writing process. This helps me to keep track of where students are at with just a glance, as well as being able to see which students have been 'stuck' at a certain stage for too long. This visual method also had an unexpected motivational impact as students all try not to be the last one. I always make it clear to the students how much writing I expect from them and if they get up to conferencing and have not met my expectations, they will need to go back and fix it up (which puts them back to the bottom of the conferencing list).

Anyway, here is the finished product (sorry for the mobile phone quality photo!)