Carnegie Library
Creative Writing: Middle School Lesson Plan
Enhance a unit on historical fiction with an engaging writing lesson. Learners bring the Industrial Era to life as they compose their own historical fiction pieces based on primary source images of Pittsburgh steel workers.
Virginia Department of Education
Grade 5 Writing Prompts
Looking for something to write about? Try out one of the prompts from three and a half pages of ideas. The list includes a variety of different topics that you can pick and choose from when planning a writing assignment or unit.
Prestwick House
The House on Mango Street Activity Pack
Enrich a unit on The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros with a selection of related activities. The packet contains nine activities that go from pre-reading through wrapping up the novel. Young readers work on studying author's...
Storytelling World
Maniac Magee
Add to children's enjoyment of the award-winning novel Maniac Magee with this fun collection of resources. From sequence of events and fact or fiction worksheets, to writing newspaper articles and creating advertisements based on the...
Scouts
The Deadly Picnic: A Lab on Deductive Reasoning
Whodunnit? Find out who killed Mr. Brooks through a logical examination of evidence. Class members fill out a couple of data tables to help them pin down the suspect. After they've figured out just who the culprit is, pupils compose...
Curated OER
Poetic Elements Are Fun!
Engage your class in the elements of poetry with a series of lessons and activities. The plans cover simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and imagery. Learners come up their their own metaphors, identify poetic...
Curated OER
Did You Know?
What would happen if you woke up one day and had become a housefly? What kinds of things would you do? Use the facts at the top of a worksheet to write a paragraph or short story about being a housefly.
Film English
Moments
Examine homelessness through a series of writing and discussion activities and a short film. Learners first come up with their own stories based on images of characters in the film. They then watch the film and respond to a series of...
Film English
World Builder
If you could build your own world from the ground up, what would you include? Ask your pupils this question, and have them write about their worlds and share with partners. Then, show the short film, which includes some impressive world...
Film English
We've All Been There
What does empathy look like? Encourage your pupils to put themselves in another person's shoes with several writing and discussion activities that relate to a featured short film. Over the course of the lesson, individuals collaborate...
Film English
Everyday
What would you do if you got an extra day every week? Partners share some information about their routines and lives and write compositions about one another based on the information. Each partner tries to guess what the other person...
Film English
Father and Son
Explore word relationships and the relationships between people with an interesting lesson plan. Learners practice pairing words that typically go together and write brief narratives using these words. They then go through a similar...
Film English
The Conditioned
Discover the lovely story of Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho with your class. Over the course of the lesson, pupils practice descriptive writing, write short narratives, collaborate in small groups, watch a powerful short film about Raimundo,...
K12 Reader
Winter Attack
A pack of hungry wolves surround a panicked buffalo – who will come out alive? Have your young writers narrate this nature scene, taking the point of view of either a wolf or the buffalo. Perfect for a narrative writing unit or for your...
The New York Times
Making Do: Learning and Growing Through Adversity
What is it that makes people keep going when they face challenges in life? Ask your class to consider this question in relation to their own experiences and as they read material from The New York Times. Using personal experiences and...
John F. Kennedy Center
Writing a Myth
Tap into the imaginative minds of young learners with a creative writing activity. After reading the myth Giants and Mosquitoes, this student guide supports young writers as they brainstorm and develop their very own creation myths....
Scholastic
What Happened Next? (Grades K-4)
Explore the structure of narrative writing with this fun, collaborative lesson. Start by reading aloud a short story, asking small groups of learners to fill in key events on a large story board prepared on the class whiteboard....
Curated OER
Express Yourself Lesson Seed 5
Building on the previous activity in this series of lesson seeds, this plan focuses on the use of dialect in Theodore Taylor's novel, The Cay. Class members examine specific lines of text, use their reading journals to respond to the...
Curated OER
Planning and Drafting a Personal Narrative
Bring your learners together to write a class narrative about the first day of school. Start off by teaching them about sequence with a quick oral activity. Then, work together to fill out a story map. Finally, compose the class...
Southern Nevada Regional Professional Development Program
“Tell Me a Story”: Moving from Reading to Writing
Narrative essay writing is the focus of a series of exercises that model for learners how to not only read a narrative, but how to also examine the techniques fiction writers use to create a setting, develop their characters, represent...
Shmoop
ELA.CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.3
Teach your class the basics of narrative writing! The resource first describes the Common Core standard for narrative writing in-depth, and then moves into how to apply the standard. Show your class the example essay and quiz them...
Curated OER
Dialogue Tags
Use a presentation on dialogue tags in a narrative writing unit or a literature instructional activity. The first two pages of the resource detail the information and examples in the following slide show, making it a good reference page...
University of Arizona
Fusing Firecrackers with Narrative
Improve your youngsters' descriptive writing. They study an object and write about what they see as a warm-up, then they read an excerpt from Paul Guest's memoir, One More Theory about Happiness. The next part of the activity prompts...
Bright Hub Education
Writing Effective Dialogue
Wait, there is an effective way to practice writing dialogue with your high school class? Great! High schoolers will have a blast writing dialogue using a list of potentially silly situations and an image of people talking. Employ the...