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Persuasive Essay Writing: The Real Story
How can you get others to agree with your point of view? This packet focuses on employing persuasive strategies and how to write descriptively. There's a writing sample provided, and a great graphic organizer. Use these tools to help...
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"Snapshot" Exercises & Sensory Detail Word Bank
Read a sample of creative descriptive writing to your science class. Discuss how writing can be used to record and communicate observations that scientists make. Reading selections and thought-provoking questions are suggested. Also...
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Brochure Writing
What do you use a brochure for? Middle schoolers or underperforming high schoolers identify the attributes of informative brochures. Either bring in a few brochures you've collected or use the sample brochures attached here. While...
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Writing with Writers
Pupils participate in Writing with Writer's, a step-by-step set of directions aimed at improving different genres of student writing. They identify the characteristics of different genres and follow a specified writing process to produce...
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Car For Sale!
Car For sale! In this GED prep activity, writers develop a classified advertisement to sell a car. After a discussion of precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language, sellers draft their ad for review, revision and...
Pulitzer Center
Writing About the "Arab Spring"
An information-rich resource, this webpage will provide your class with all the information they need to explore a relevant real-world and little understood topic: the Middle East and the people's revolutions that shook it in the spring...
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Writing Traits Instruction
Students assess and critique a wide variety of writing samples for each of the traits of writing strands from literature, composition writing, reading and assessment tools. They create and design a descriptive definition piece of writing...
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Review Steps in the Writing Process and Explore a Poem
Learners practice their persuasive writing skills. In this writing process lesson, students write essays that meet the requirements of the included text element worksheets and analyze poetry of their choosing.
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Paragraph Development Exercise: Comparison
Teach class members how to use comparison in their writing to clarify and enrich ideas. Referring back to the brief description and the sample paragraph, writers develop a paragraph that uses comparison effectively. More scaffolding and...
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Picture This
Students create a descriptive paragraph conveying ideas utilizing a personal photograph as a prompt for their writing. This concept includes the writers emotions, personal issues, education, art and photography. They share insights to...
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Creating Bloggers
Blogs provide the motivation for this richly detailed writing instructional activity. After viewing blogs on various websites, class members pick topics, create a blog, and post an entry. Your bloggers then evaluate their work using...
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Stir Up a Character Analysis Recipe
What ingredients make up a character? A cup of honesty, a dash of humor, a pinch of cynicism? Based on real cookbooks they review in class, learners at any grade level three and up write recipes to describe characters familiar to your...
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Poetry Gifts
What kind of shoe is this person? What time of day is this person? Aspiring poets’ responses to a list of questions provide descriptive words and phrases that can be crafted into a blank verse poem. A link to sample poems is provided.
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Expository Writing (Informational Brochure)
Students identify the attributes of informative brochures. In this written communication lesson, students examine sample brochures and persuasive essays to investigate the layout and the information presented. Students then create their...
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Writing a Personal Narrative
High schoolers analyze a variety of rhetorical devices including metaphor, hyperbole, metonomy and imagery. They read samples of autobiographies, work in groups to complete writing skills activities and produce individual personal...
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Assessing the Traits: What is Good Writing?
Students assess samples of writing for each trait and discuss the rationale for scoring. They understand that the traits of writing offer a common language for revision. This lesson includes a scoring rubric for the students to use.
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Who Wrote That?
Scholars creatively respond to writing prompts. They respond to writing prompts that reveal clues regarding their personalities and then use the prompts written in class to guess the prompts that belong to their classmates.
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Responses to Literature
Middle and high schoolers hone their writing skills by reading Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and the poem Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out. They fill out a graphic organizer (included here), and use the organizer to write an...
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Letters of Inquiry
Students compose letters of inquiry. In this written communication lesson, students read sample letters of inquiry about sites in Washington, D.C. Students then write their own letters of inquiry to the Washington, D.C. Chamber of Commerce.
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Irish Eyes: Taking a Look at Local Landscape
Direct your class’s attention to the elements that make their community unique. After examining sample travel brochures, groups select something from their community to use as the subject, and then research, create, and publish a...
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Writing a Query Letter
Learners examine how to write a query letter to a publisher. They plan a short story they would like to write, conduct Internet research about possible publishers, and write a sample query letter.
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Basic Paragraph
Students with special needs examine how to write an organized, basic, five-sentence paragraph. Students write a paragraph with a topic sentence, supporting sentences and a concluding sentence. They first practice by viewing and...
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Creating Student Advertising
Students explore common advertising strategies used by the media. In this advertising lesson, students identify persuasive language in advertisements and construct their own persuasive ad.
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Thank you!
Students type a personal business letter to their elementary principal, teacher or pastor to thank them.