Curated OER
Picture This
Elementary writers practice writing descriptive paragraphs by adding adjectives and sensory words to their writing. They use a picture of a monster for their descriptive paragraph. This 12-page lesson should increase your charges...
Curated OER
Vivid Verbs
Spice up your writing! Your amateur writers will benefit from concentrating on understanding and improving verb use in writing. An introductory activity addresses weak verbs. A second exercise helps them see the importance of strong...
Curated OER
Marvelous Mysteries
Fifth graders explore mystery stories. In this reading and writing lesson, 5th graders complete a planning guide for an original mystery. Students use the writing process to create a mystery story.
Curated OER
Quick Writes
Students write on a variety of topics, maximize creative and expository writing skills, develop focused writing, organize ideas, incorporate detail in writing, and exhibit varied and precise word choice.
Curated OER
Self Biography
Get to know your students with this project. Each individual writes an autobiography that is at least seven pages long with major facts, visual facts, focal stories, and chronology. The lesson includes a point breakdown for the...
Curated OER
Enhancing Writing Through Technology
Students participate in a class survey of their favorite activity to do in the snow and organize the results in a graph. They write a paragraph about the graph using language from a class-developed word web and include both an opening...
Curated OER
Paragraph Unity
Young scholars explore how to develop a complete paragraph using a piece of paper folded into a large fan. They SEE how each sentence relates to the topic.
Virginia Department of Education
Maintaining Organization, Clarity, Central Idea, and Unity
Introduce and challenge the essay organization skills of your junior high writers with the paper reconstruction activity in this demonstration. Theydetermine what the word organization means, and discover the basic organizational...
Curated OER
Introductions and Conclusions
Students discuss the importance of writing clear, well structured essays. They explore the use of introductions and conclusions when writing an essay. Students compose an essay using both introductions and conclusions.
Curated OER
Six Trait Writing with Charles Dickens and Shel Silverstein
Second graders identify the traits of good writing in poems and stories in the six lessons of this unit. The traits analyzed are used to improve the student's own writing skills.
Curated OER
Organizing Ideas
Eighth graders investigate varous writing skills as part of larger course of study. The lesson is essentially a rough guide for conducting a class for writing. The main focus of the plan is organizing ideas using various strategies that...
Curated OER
Creative Story Writing
Young scholars recognize predictable patterns in literature. They use the selected pattern to create their own writing using the same type of literary pattern. The new writing is proofread by other students and the editing is done until...
Curated OER
Just Get to the Good Part
Students summarize nonfiction text. After reviewing the steps for summarization, students independently read a nonfiction article. They write a summary paragraph using the six-step process outlined by the instructor during guided practice.
Curated OER
Creative Writing
Fourth graders participate in an observation hike in this lesson. They orally share observations from their hike, and develop a paragraph in a shared writing exercise. Finally, the write their paragraph about process writing in their...
Curated OER
Prewriting, Using Pictures
Young readers practice getting information from both the text and the illustrations found in books they are reading. They see that quite often, authors use pictures to help them get their writing process started. Youngsters are invited...
Perkins School for the Blind
Encouraging Students Who are Blind or Visually Impaired to Express Their Feelings and Explore Imagination
Being expressive in a creative, empathetic, or imaginative way is not only fun, it builds good pre-writing and communication skills. Learners with visual impairments have a roundtable discussion session where several sentence frames are...
Curated OER
Science Inventions
Third graders explore the world of inventions by describing their impact on their own lives. In this technology lesson, 3rd graders practice writing descriptive paragraphs about different inventions that they find interesting Students...
Curated OER
Swoosh-Remember That
Students use a six step process to write a summary of a provided paragraph. The steps include: delete unimportant information, delete repeated information, substitute easy terms for a list of items, add a series of events with an easy...
Brigham Young University
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Fishbowl Discussion
After reading through Act II of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, take some time to discuss the references to death in the play. For this fishbowl discussion, learners prepare questions, practice answering individually and with...
Curated OER
The News Article and The Editorial
Here is an outstanding series of lessons on journalism, writing newspaper articles, and writing editorials. This type of writing has long-been neglected in our schools, so this collection of writing activities is most-valuable. Along...
CC Homestead
Summarize
Designed for third graders but appropriate for older learners as well, this packet of materials underscores the necessity of teaching kids how to summarize, how to identify main ideas and supporting details, and how to ask questions...
Curated OER
A Course in Basic Skills
Tenth graders complete a course in basic skills in order to meet the standards for sophomore year. Using one of their classmates papers, they identify the main idea, topic sentence and theme. They also identify the transitional words...
Curated OER
Creating a Peace Poem
Second graders write a poem using words from a list and practice poetic forms. In this lesson on writing a peace poem, 2nd graders brainstorm words or phrases associated with "peace." Students choose a poetic form to express their...
Curated OER
What will you be for Halloween?
First graders construct a story sticking to the topic with 2-4 sentences.