Looking for suggestions on how to organize a creating writing workshop? For topic suggestions appropriate for various grade levels? Check out a resource packet, designed for English language arts instructors, that is packed with ideas...

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...

Conclude your unit on Peter and the Starcatchers with an involved final writing project that requires learners to write persuasive pieces, compose short stories, create brochures about the setting of the novel, and choose from a...

Assign this narrative essay after finishing Puddn'head Wilson. Learners write about their own experiences with overcoming obstacles. A five-step process is laid out on this assignment page.

Here is a must-have resource for studying fairy tales, myths, and folktales with your class! It includes instructional ideas, activities, and materials to support a month-long review of these three unique genres of writing.

After completing Juliet Marillier's young adult novel Wildwood Dancing, class members rewrite a traditional fairy tale, making three significant changes to illustrate a theme of their choosing.

Here is a good interdisciplinary project that combines creative and narrative writing with studies of the Holocaust. Your young historians will compose a diary of experiences from the perspective of an individual living during the time...

Poetry Soup, a reading and writing unit constructed by the Petrified Forest National Park, will have scholars hungry to learn about nature. The cross-content unit contains topics related to history, science, and language arts. Content...

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...

Excerpts from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and from John Fante's Ask the Dust, as well as a variety of primary source documents provide the background for an examination of the migrant experience from 1920-1945.

Fourth graders write from the perspective of a child in the colonial period. In this writing lesson, 4th graders create a fictional character living in the colonial period and write about daily life from their perspective.

Extend learning through summer with these activity ideas! Individuals can choose one or all nine of the activities, which range from a summer reading goal to an examination of local insects (with accompanying story prompt). See the...

Here is a nice set of activities and discussion questions to accompany your class reading of No Pretty Pictures, a memoir of a young girl's experiences and struggle for survival during the Holocaust.

Get your pupils outside and teach them about peace at the same time! Scholars create a list describing peace, hike outside, add to that list, and later create poems. The exercises support differentiation for your individual classes as...

Finished your novel? What’s next? Designing the book cover, of course. But how to begin? After examining the covers of published books and noting the common elements of these jackets, young novelists design a front and back cover for...

Add a little glitter to your Mardi Gras celebration with a packet that includes information about the history of Mardi Gras. It also provides information about how different communities celebrate the holiday, as well as templates for...

Grizzly bears can be up to 600 pounds and require a great deal of food, especially to survive hibernation. Comprised of multiple games, the third lesson of five only uses one setup. Pupils run around a large field, sorting and collecting...

Young poets are asked to craft a poem in the voice of a first person narrator, a dramatic monologue of sorts, that reveals not only a dramatic situation but something of the narrator's character as well.

Dead trees provide nutrients for the soil, food for animals, protection and a home for organisms, a seed-bed for new trees, and a place for nitrogen-fixing bacteria to live. In the activity, pupils collect decaying logs, expose them to a...

More than 127 non-native species live in Glacier National Park in Montana and their infestations are growing! Pupils read about and gather samples of exotic plants. Participants create a master book of pressed plants and complete a...

Your students already know when they like a story and when they don't, but they may not know that the plots of these stories are shaping that opinion. Like all resources in this series, the two activities and quizzes provided here deal...

Students respond to a prompt by writing about how the development of a character can affect the narrative.