Discovering just the right word to use while improving one's writing skills becomes an intriguing search for young writers who may need quality choices to spur them on.
A Word Write Now brings the concept of children's writing resources to a whole new level! Many young writers, when looking for alternate vocabulary, will consult a thesaurus which offers few choices, confusing or inappropriate options, or no useful synonyms. This can be frustrating for child and teacher alike.
In this magnificent full-color ninety page spiral-bound reference, an experienced Structure & Style writing teacher has brilliantly organized words not by definitions or meanings—but by character qualities and behavior traits.
Furthermore, she has divided the words by part-of-speech, making it simple for even young children to find appropriate and effective "-ly" adverbs, strong verbs, quality adjectives, and nouns which correspond to the character or behavior of the person, animal, event, or idea they are attempting to portray.
Often students may not know exactly what word they are looking for, but they can peruse the lists in the book, scanning, for example, The "Cheerful Clown Fish," finding adjectives like amenable, congenial, sweet-tempered, or perhaps adverbs such as cordially, good-naturedly, warmly; even verbs including beamed, consented, winked, and more! In the section on "Ways of Hearing," a young writer will find categories for animal noises (bleat, peep, squeal), object noises (clunk, jangle, rustle), human sounds (moan, rasp, twitter), loud and quiet sounds (cacophonous, grating, thunderous, muffled, soothing, subdued) as well as nouns for things that make sounds, verbs for listening, even verb phrases like "turned a deaf ear."
By scanning lists such as these, children can find words that they might never have thought to use on their own. A word hops off of the page, through their eyes, into their brain, out their hand, and on to their paper—allowing them to write a word they never would have thought of on their own. This process, of course, helps them to internalize and gain ownership of new words, thereby enhancing their active vocabulary and building word power for life!
Following the IEW philosophy, every page has a "My Words" column for children to add their own and personalize their reference. Additionally, each section has quotations from literature to enhance the child's understanding of each quality or trait. Although the author has given permission for parents and teachers to photocopy pages for use within a family or one classroom, this colorful book is so beautiful that each child deserves their own copy—it's a treasure!
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