Triple Scoop Words

So this week I went to an Adrienne Gear workshop. She is a teacher/Language Specialist from the Vancouver School District. She is an amazing speaker and has a great reading and writing program. I have been using many of her ideas over the past couple years, but not as consistently as I should would like to. One of the biggest ideas I got from her this time, was the two overarching goals she has for her students' writing. She explains that good writers keep their reader interested and to write in such a way as to not confuse them..She has several writing techniques that teach kids how to engage their reader, and to keep their writing organized. In my class we will be talking about these techniques over the course of the year and putting them into practice as much as possible. This week we started talking about the writing technique of triple scoop words. One way that writers keep their readers engaged is by choosing interesting words that convey ideas and meaning more effectively than more simple words. We read some books, in particular, Max's Castle by Kate Banks which is a great book, and talked about what makes a word a triple scooper. I had them think about ice cream and how getting one scoop of ice cream is ok, but it doesn't make you excited or happy, it doesn't leave you satisfied, but if you got three giant scoops of ice cream with toppings you are way more excited and are totally satisfied with the amount of ice cream you got. The same goes with words in your writing, you can say something is fun, but the word fun is a little boring, it doesn't make the reader want to read more. However the word entertaining or engaging or stupendous would be much more interesting. So we went through a bunch of single scoop words and came up with synonyms for those words (for older kids a Thesaurus would be a great tool to use), and wrote them down on a piece of paper to have for future reference. I was amazed at some of the words they were able to come up with.

Triple Scoop Words

The next day we did a fun little project that showcased some of our triple scoop words.

Most of the students understood the concept of putting the single scoop word on the bottom and the better words on the top....as you can see not everyone listened...... ;)
Next week we will be putting our triple scoop words into action when we write about emotions (because good writers want their readers to connect to their writing). We'll see how it goes....