Exaggerate: (v)- to magnify beyond the limits of truth

Today in class, we read some Mark Twain and talked about exaggeration. We talked about exapmples of exaggeration from the story, then for fun, I asked them to write a paragraph using exaggeration to describe their experience with this week’s snow storm.

To inspire their young minds, I showed them a Facebook post from my friend Brian:

Brian McMurray
Survival Log: Day 2 - Things are beginning to degrade. The snow has piled up past the garage doors making travel difficult. I have removed the tires from the car and shredded them to fashion a series of digging tools. Was also able to duct tape a fork to a pool cue and create a makeshift harpoon, which I immediately used to harpoon the neighbor’s cat. Poor guy never saw it coming but at least now we're eating.

These were some of the paragraphs my gems came up with... clearly we still have some work to do...

"I was so bored during the snow storm, I thought I was dead."

"On our snow day it was so bad. The snow drift piled up to the sky. The wind was so cold that when old ladies go outside, they swear up and down they see polar bears."


"There was so much snow I couldn’t see outside. We were out of food so we had to eat snow. I died of the ultimate brain freeze."

"On Tuesday, Des Moines Schools got out of school early because there was snow up to our eyes. We had a hard time getting home. There were 1,000 car accidents in 15 minutes. It was OUTRAGEOUS!"


"On Tuesday was a bad day because it was alot of snow. It was really coold outside. We whent home urly. It was exaggeration to be home and I didn’t know what to do."

"The snow was so white and deep it would go past your head. This big bad blizzard happened on Wednesday. Oh jeez it was BIG! The wind would blow you away all the way to Mexico."


"Yesterday during the blizzard we didn’t go anywhere cuz we couldn’t get out the door. My mom suggested we clean the house. We really had no choice cuz my mom was a force to be reckoned with. That was the worst day of my life. School would of bin better."

Holy American Classic Novelist Batman!

Today I introduced the vocabulary words for our next short story, taken from Mark Twain’s memoir, “Roughing It.” I explained how Mark Twain was a famous American author who wrote classic novels including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I reminded students that Mark Twain lived before television and internet, and how in those days, people had to read the newspaper to learn about what was going on in the world.

We proceeded to use our vocabulary words to complete the following sentences about Mark Twain:

As a young man, Mark Twain held a wide array of jobs.

Twain claims to have taken news stories and made them more sensational.

Twain preferred to earn his livelihood as a writer that as a miner.

It was more tolerable to write about hay than to work in a coal mine.

...At this point a student raises his hand...

Student: “So did Mark Twain do all of this before he decided to be Batman?”

Me: “Like I said, Mark Twain was a writer. You’re thinking of Bruce Wayne.”