Dead Words Funeral

Not the best picture, but you get the idea. Every fall, I have a Dead Words Funeral with my class. I got the idea from a TeacherTube video I saw years ago. Basically, you get together a list of words that are boring and overused. Your kiddos use thesauruses, their minds, and thesaurus.com to find BETTER synonyms for those common words. After that, the students each choose a word and create a tombstone.

For example:

Here lies: COLD

COLD is remembered by:

chilly, frigid, freezing, etc.

The kids have such a good time that they usually create tombstones for multiple words. We hang them in the room as a living thesaurus that we can add to and use as reference. One year, we got so into it, that the kids decided to wear all black the next day and we had a funeral procession from fourth grade classroom to fourth grade classroom. Some kids even grabbed tissues, fake cried, and waved the tissues in the air as they left each room. It was dramatic. And awesome.