My “Word Flower” Word Wall

**UPDATE (September 5, 2012)** I have just posted templates for these word flowers to my TeachersPayTeachers store. The templates also come with a word list, brainstorming activity, and eleven activity sheets. To view this resource, please click here.**

I must admit, I love pretty things in my classroom, and that includes my word wall! I decided on this alternative to a word wall after trying to think of a way to display commonly misspelled words along with exciting alternatives for “dull” words.

In the middle of each flower is what I call a “dull” word. Usually the dull words are the ones that are overused in students’ writing, such as “good,” “nice,” etc. On the petals I wrote exciting alternatives to the dull words.

I definitely went through some trial and error with this word wall. The first year that I used it, I was so excited about it that I had it all put up in my classroom during the summer before my grade 4 students even arrived. This proved very ineffective, as they thought it was cool, but barely glanced at it during the writing process (like I had hoped they would!)

The next year, I involved the students in looking through an electronic thesaurus for synonyms and gradually put the flowers up (as most word walls are supposed to be done!), which of course was the better method.

This took quite a few hours to make, but was definitely worth it for me! It’s a great summer project! To make it, I simply made one circle tracer and one petal tracer. Each petal is about the size of a half sheet of copy paper. The pieces were traced onto construction paper and I used a thick black marker to write the words. I laminated mine; however, that does make the pieces “glare” a bit with the light in the classroom, so students sometimes had to get up and walk to the word wall to see a word. An un-laminated version may be better for some rooms. I put all of mine on one wall in the classroom, but if space does not allow you to do that, I think you could spread these all over the room (as long as students know where to look for each word!)

If you would prefer to purchase templates for this word wall, along with accompanying activity sheets, please view Synonym Word Flowers in my TpT store by clicking here or on the image below.

Have a great day,