Curated OER
Around the Room Short Story
Collective story writing is a great way to reinforce the concept of story elements and collaborative learning. Young writers discuss story elements such as, setting, character, action, climax, conclusion, foreshadowing, dialogue, and...
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Scrambled Stories II
Review story elements with your class. They will use examples from a story to develop critical-thinking questions. Then they use a graphic organizer to describe the setting, character, and plot of the story, focusing on how they...
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Jeffrey and Sloth: Six Traits of Writing
Use drawings as inspiration. Have learners doodle for 10 minutes before beginning the lesson. Then, have them use their doodles to inspire a story. Several writing activities are included here to play with writing. One of my favorites...
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Noisy Nora, Studious Students: Story Elements
Alliterative adjective nicknames generate stories inspired by Rosemary Wells' book Noisy Nora (also a thematic complement to any class with children who make a ruckus to get attention). Class members explore basic story elements --...
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Narrative Writing
Are you the oldest in your family? The youngest? The middlest? How do you feel about your place in your family? After reading such stories as My Rotten, Redheaded Older Brother by Patricia Polacco and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by...
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Writing the Essay
Relate the structure of the essay to the structure of a building. The class compares an essay to a building, with the writer being the architect, the introduction being the foundation, and so on. They use the visual representation of a...
Nosapo
What Is in a Sentence, Paragraph, and Story?
Language arts is made up of many parts. Learners review the parts of a sentence, as well as how to make a simple sentence into a complex sentence, before examining full paragraphs and identifying the topic, body, and concluding sentence...
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It's Your Opinion
Everyone has a different opinion about the characters they read about in books. Have your class explore forming an opinion and finding evidence to support it as they read and discuss what they think about a particular character. They...
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Counting Sentences' Words
Explore language arts by completing a worksheet with class. They read the story Owl Moon and discuss the rhythm of the writing and how action verbs are used appropriately. Then complete a writing worksheet which discusses writing...
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The Magic in Writing
Students watch a portion of a familiar film and write responses to a series of questions. They apply their observations to short stories.
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Journal Writing-Pets
Learners create a writing journal. In this journal writing lesson plan, students discuss what to write in a journal and why it is fun to keep a journal. Learners start their journal by writing about a pet and use the entry to write a...
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Imagine a Kelp Forest
Students write a story based on their research of the kelp forest. In this ecosystem lesson, students view a video and research the kelp forest ecosystem. They write a short story imagining the discovery of a new species in the kelp forest.
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Happiness is A Warm Puppy
Students investigate dog breeds and write a short story from a dog's perspective. In this dog research and writing lesson, students watch the film, "Dog: The Early Years. They apply critical thinking skills to determine which type of dog...
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Understanding Realistic Fiction
Students write a story. In this genres lesson, students learn the meaning of realistic fiction and write a short story in that genre.
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Combining with Participial Phrases
Combine participial phrases and creative writing with this lesson, which is equally helpful for writing skills and conventions. After a mini-lesson on participial phrases and reading the picture book Dancing in the Wings, pupils use a...
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Lesson Plan 6: Introducing the Elements of Plot-Part Two
November is National Novel Writing Month, so if your young authors are embarking on this journey, be sure they understand plot elements. This collaborative activity fits into the context of the larger NaNoWriMo project; however, the...
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Topic: English - 'Making Connections' - Coordinating Conjunctions
In this sentence writing worksheet, students learn about using conjunctions in sentences. They then use what they learned to answer the 6 questions on the worksheet. The answers are on the last page.
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Strategies for Organization and Elaboration of Personal Narrative
Personal narrative writing is usually a favorite form of writing for youngsters because they get to write about a personal experience. The lesson here asks pupils to take a piece of narrative writing and improve it by following...
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Vivid Adjectives
Young scholars review adjectives and play a game where students compete to see who can write the most adjectives for a given noun. They write a story about one topic and try to use a variety of adjectives in sequence tto describe a noun.
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Animating a Historic Event
Research a historic event using textbooks, primary source documents, the Internet, and other library and media resources. Young historians will take the research they have gathered and write an attention-grabbing, historically accurate...
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Pair-Share: Constructing Paragraph Order
Students write with controlled and/or subtle organization. They identify the main idea and explicit details. Students analyze paragraph and essay structure. They utilize context clues to identify organization.
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Hollywood
Pupils listen to a play, or perhaps, take turns reading portions of it aloud. Afterward, they thoughtfully analyze and discuss the components of a well-written play. Next, a theme is assigned, and each person writes a play in conjunction...
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Say What?
Students explore the literal and figurative meanings of twenty-nine phrases and sayings. This unit of nine lessons integrates written expression and convention to demonstrate the value of idioms to the language.