Students in grade five at St. Leo’s had an opportunity to work with dictionaries and thesauruses through a lesson from their new writing program, Classical Composition by Memoria Press. Through this program, students learn how to outline, how to summarize a larger piece of literature by just writing the facts, and how to enhance a sentence without losing the meaning through word choice. As a supplement to the program, students were assigned a portion of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat and were asked to inflate the language using synonyms found in a thesaurus or creating substitute descriptive phrases. This project helped students understand how a word or phrase can change the meaning and alter the understanding of a sentence or story. Shown in the photographs are students adding illustrations to their project. On one side of the paper is the Dr. Seuss version and on the other side is the student’s inflated version.
