Thesaurus and Writing and Nouns

The students typed a simple sentence into Word.  For example:

The little boy cried.

They highlighted little and right clicked.  Then they looked at synonyms and clicked on thesaurus.  They had a good time looking for a new word to use for little.  Then we did the same thing for cried.  Nothing came up but the word cry.  We talked about it being the base word of cry so told the computer to look up cry.  Once again they enjoyed the choices of words.  We talked about having to add ed to the word because the sentence was past tense.  The new sentences were definitely more interesting that the original.

One day we highlighted, copied and pasted a passage into word.  We also copied and pasted the address so anyone looking at our paper would know where the passage came from.  Then we practiced bolding words by looking for nouns to bold.  We also changed the color of the text a few times just to get them familiar with it.