Colorful Synonyms

ESL students need all the vocabulary they can get, but it is not always effective to simply give them lists to memorize. The first day back from Christmas vacation, we did this activity with the goal of opening up a whole lot of words to ELL's very quickly and visually. Since the board went up, students have also used it as a reference for enhancing thier writing. It's a visual thesaurus.

Creation:
I collected paint chips in a variety of colors and each student got 5 of them to work with. They started with a boring, over-used word like 'good' and wrote it on the palest color block. Then, they looked up thier word up in the thesaurus and as they found richer words, they wrote them on the more vibrant color blocks progressively until they reached something like 'magnificent.'

I collected the paint chips and layered the colors to make this collage. It's a very simple activity with minimal prep and it's the bulletin board that keeps on giving as a working reference.