(Microsoft Tips for Teachers)

Use the Highlight tool in Microsoft Word 2002 tool to highlight words in a document.  Try highlighting nouns, adjectives, weekly spelling words, words for geometric shapes, and so on. Students can even make changes to the highlighted words to change or complete a story or poem. This might remind you of the famous Mad Libs activity that students love. Try out some funny words to make stories and poems really wacky, or try scary words to make a very spooky story-just in time for Halloween.

Try some of these Web sites for some interactive word fun:

• Wacky Web Tales: http://www.eduplace.com/tales/
• StoryFun!: http://www.mit.edu/storyfun/
• FunBrain's Wacky Tales: http://www.funbrain.com/wacky/

How To:

1. Start Microsoft Word 2002 and make sure a new document is open.
2. Start writing a story or poem. When you come to a word that you would like to highlight (a noun or an adjective, for example, or the word noun to represent a noun), click the drop-down arrow to the right of the Highlight tool, found on the Formatting toolbar. Select a highlight color to use, and then double-click a word that you would like to change or make stand out. You can also click and drag the Highlight tool across a group of words.
3. Continue writing your story or poem, using the Highlight tool to make text stand out.
4. Save your file, and then have a friend replace your highlighted words to make a really silly, scary, or wacky story.

More Ideas:

• Teachers might want to try creating some templates for students to use. You can focus on the parts of speech that you are studying in class, science vocabulary words or definitions from a lesson, historians from social studies, mathematical words or definitions, and so on.
• When you are checking student work, highlight part of a sentence or a paragraph that needs editing to assist your students when they rewrite their work.

Color-code the highlighting-for example, put nouns in yellow, verbs in light blue, weekly spelling words in light green, and so on.