Vocabulary Paint Chips

Paint chips are free! You can get them at any hardware store. One activity is for students to rank words. Students get a handful of related words that they must sort. They can sort weakest to strongest or strongest to weakest. Students begin to understand shades of meaning and get to practice working with synonyms and antonyms.

Print the list of word groups on cardstock and cut the words into strips. Put the words in envelopes and write the common theme or topic from the word group on the front of the envelope. Students work in pairs to rank the words in the envelopes from mildest to most extreme. Once they finish ranking, they copy their words onto the paint chips in order. You can get the paint chips from your local Lowe's, but you can also visit any paint store or most hardware stores to get your own. If you tell people at Lowe's that you are using the paint strips in a classroom, they are usually happy to donate.

After students complete the word list, you can add a hole punch to the top of the paint chip and clip them altogether on a binder ring. Hang the stack of ranked words in the room to use as a classroom thesaurus. It is a great student resource during writing activities to help students avoid overusing common words. This is particularly helpful with "said". Create a list of variations for said and rank them!