I'm Talking!- A Thesaurus Rap

One of my favorite lessons that I took from my mentor teacher was this thesaurus rap. She did it with a 4th grade GATE group and I've done it with 3rd graders. It works a bit better with the higher grades, but I've still enjoyed it. 

After putting students in pairs or small groups, I assign each group a very basic word. Some that I used this year were: mad, sad, happy, nice, big, and small. 

Students use a thesaurus to find 13 synonyms for the assigned word. Using the following template, they fill in the synonyms to create a thesaurus rap.

___________ !

I’m talking ___________!

I’m talking ___________!

I’m talking ___________,

___________, ___________!

I’m talking ___________, ___________, ___________, ___________, ___________!

I’m talking ___________,

___________, ___________!

I’m talking ___________!

When they finish, it might look like this:

Happy !

I’m talking joyful!

I’m talking ecstatic!

I’m talking glad,

content, pleased!

I’m talking delighted, blissful, cheerful, exultant, thrilled!

I’m talking elated,

overjoyed, exhilarated!

I’m talking happy!

Make sure that the first and last word of the poem is the assigned word. Also, if there are not enough synonyms for the original word, then I have them choose one of the synonyms they do have to look up. For example, if the word happy didn't have enough synonyms, I'd have them look up delighted or glad. That would usually help them fill in all of the slots.

My students had a blast rappin' out their I'm Talking! poems. Fun was had by all. I even uploaded audio files to my class website so parents could hear!

**If anyone has an easier workaround for Blogger that doesn't involve creating a movie file, I'd love to edit this post to include an audio file.**