40 Ways to Get There!

Our writing teaching gave us a challenge (at least to me it was a challenge). One of her pet peeves was using the word "go" or "went". It is so unimaginative and so boring! I agree with her wholeheartedly. When you are writing something try to use all your senses so that the reader has an idea what your mood is when you are communicating your ideas onto the paper. She suggested a game to play called "40 ways to get there." Basically you pick a place to where you would like to start and then pick a destination and find 40 ways to get there. For us, we chose an easy destination, going from the front door to the back door. How will we get there? Oh the imaginations of my little ones minds are incredible. Are you ready? (disclaimer: I won't bore you with all 40, but here are a few of my favorites) We climbed, crawled, tangoed, dribbled, sauntered, dashed, skipped, trotted, pushed, played, hugged, tiptoed, squeezed, slithered, stomped!, marched, and tripped our way to the door. Each verb represents a feeling or a sense of what is happening to the reader on our journey to the door. If I stomped my way to the door, you get the sense that I'm angry! Instead of telling you I'm angry I'm going to show you how I'm feeling. It really puts the reader in a position to know how your feeling when you show them how your feeling, not just tell them.

I was way proud of all our ways to get there and we posted them on paper and proudly have displayed our list on our school room walls to use in the future when the word go or went seems to pop into our papers, we now have a resource to help us along. We will continue with this game to create more of a variety of how to go or how we went! Play along with us and see how many different ways you go anywhere and let your imagination run wild!