Curated OER
Persuasion as Text: Organizational, Grammatical, and Lexical Moves in Barbara Jordan’s "All Together Now"
A thorough lesson plan on persuasive writing takes middle schoolers through several activities, including group discussion, collaborative posters, and independent writing. They compare historical speeches and analyze the persuasive...
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Discovering Angel Island: The Story Behind the Poems
Poems carved into the wooden walls of the Asian immigrant prisons on Angel Island provide upper elementary graders an opportunity to study not only the story behind the poems but to also focus on the figurative language employed by the...
Curated OER
Unlocking the Secrets of a Persuasive Essay
Full of tips about structure, audience, and evidence in a persuasive essay, this presentation would be a great way to start a writing unit in your class. One slide advises young writers to make up quotes and statistics in their essays....
Curated OER
Writing Short Stories: The Fun Way
Do your young authors suffer from writer's block when they try to write short stories? Access their natural creativity with C-Gor, the writing monster! The instructional activity takes aspiring authors through a new writing process...
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Unleash Your Inner Editor
NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a writing project for which participants write an entire novel in a single month. If you have decided to this in your class, this resource will be useful for you. This is an editing learning...
Curated OER
Letter Writing Chart
This is a nicely-constructed letter writing worksheet in which learners use a chart to brainstorm the content for an apology letter to a friend. They fill in the chart and then write the apology letter. This brainstorming process would...
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Episodic Writing Using Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff
Help your middle-schoolers expand their writing skills with this lesson on episodic writing, which focuses on story details, idea development, and organization. After reading "The Eighth Picture: End of Summer" from Patricia Reilly...
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Same Theme, Different Story Using Fox by Margaret Wild
Middle schoolers work with themes in this lesson, which is based on Fox by Margaret Wild. Because the book has multiple themes, it is a great way to transition into exploring literary analysis and writing stories. A Six Trait writing...
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"I Never Knew That!"
Incorporating To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, narrative writing, and friendly letters, this lesson is ideal for any number of units in your classroom. First, read chapter 10 of the novel, noting Scout and Jem's reactions to their...
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BBC Learning English, Writing (Culture)
Include this writing worksheet in your lesson about essay organization. After anwering five questions regarding their culture, middle schoolers use their responses to form the basis of a five paragraph guide to their culture. Each...
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Organizing by Writing
Middle schoolers analyze how to use writing for generating and organizing their thoughts before communicating them. They use the questions on the first handout to organize a three-minute introduction of themselves to their small group....
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High School Literary Paragraph Development
You can cover literary elements, writing organization, and proofreading skills in this SMART board lesson plan. Using student paragraphs from a previous assignment, the class reviews the best examples of writing. A SMART board activity...
Bright Hub Education
How to Outline, Plan & Write a Memoir
Get to know each individual through a memoir project. The instructional activity outlined here is a bit vague, but has some promising ideas for graphic organizers to help writers prepare their work. In order to succeed with the...
Curated OER
It's Happening Where: Graphic Organizer #1 for Newspaper Articles
Planning a newspaper or journalism unit? Use these graphic organizer to help your young reporters organizer their articles. The first page instructs users to plan out the structure of their article, while the second page prompts them to...
Curated OER
Research
This research PowerPoint provides questions to consider when selecting a research topic. Emerging writers consider their purpose for writing and the audience they are writing for, and then practice narrowing down a topic given a list of...
Curated OER
Visible Speech: A Short Course in the Fundamentals of Writing
Use this presentation to introduce a class or lecture about writing organization. The slide show is the first part in a five-part series, titled "What is an Essay?" The slideshow is short and could use more detail, but functions as a...
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Visible Speech: What is a Sentence?
Use this straightforward presentation as a basic guide to your grammar unit. With explanations of the parts of a simple sentence (subject, verb, direct object), the slideshow is a good way to reinforce students' prior knowledge about...
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Organizing One’s Thoughts
Students take a closer look at the organization of written pieces. In this writing skills lesson, students examine transitions, repetition, parallelism, and other organizational patterns in writing.
Curated OER
Pre Writing Strategies
Second graders review story mapping along with characters, setting, problem, events, and solution. They view pictures and tell the story of their picture orally then they write rough drafts and final copies of their stories in the...
Curated OER
Zoom, Zoom, Zoom
Third graders participate in a pre-writing activity that reinforces organization in writing. They write a piece of narrative writing using the traits of organization.