This activity is based on a story (available in PDF format here ) which uses the word "said" lots of times. It can seem very repetitive when you read it, so it is your children's job to change the "said" words to other more interesting words, e.g. explained, described, discussed, questioned...

Children should make sure that the alternatives that they choose should "fit" in to the sentence, i.e. they make sense when you read the sentence again.

You might want to provide a thesaurus for the children to use when they are looking for alternatives.

Please bear in mind that there are a few other mistakes on this page, which you should look out for...

• Punctuation marks are before the commas (unlike in British English)
• Remember to put new speakers on a new line.
• Can you replace the word "too" with a more suitable form?
• Can you add some punctuation to "were" to make it correct?
• Can you spot any other errors which could be corrected?