When asked to describe a character, students often use words they are comfortable with... and I usually end up hearing the word "nice" or "mean" or any number of other simple adjectives. We worked on expanding our vocabulary today by ranking lists of words that were synonymous (or close enough to being synonymous) with some common adjectives. We called these "Shades of Meaning" (though they are also known as semantic gradients). I let the kids choose their groups and then they were given one of the following adjectives: mean, happy, sad, and nice. They were also given cards with near-synonyms and were asked to rank them on a scale of Least (mean, happy, etc.) to Most (mean, happy, etc.). The discussions in the groups were very insightful as were their explanations to the class. I gave others in the class an opportunity to give their own opinions if they differed from the group. We stressed that there was not a right or wrong answer- it was just an activity to get us thinking of more adjectives to describe our characters.
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