{writing lab} word tickets

For my young writers' workshop this week, I bought a roll of 2000 tickets to use to make word tickets. (I originally read about this idea for collection words in the awesome book Poem Crazy: Freeing Your Life with Words by Susan Wooldridge)

We meet at the library, so I first asked the kids to go find a random book - any book to bring back to the table. We then spent about 20 minutes scanning pages for "big ticket" words. We wanted to find words that were exceptional, or funny or just sounded good.  Each writer filled an envelope with words and took a long strip home to continue the hunt. 

The words can be used as prompts or kick starters before or during the writing process. Several of the kids really got into it and found so many great words; it will interesting to see how many make it into the writing they share next week.