Writing is Hard Work

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...

Writing is a process, and lesson planning is, too! A personal narrative unit stresses the writing process to pupils, who first examine various stories and poems as a model of autobiographical writing and then write their own stories....

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...

Ease young writers into the process of writing a story with a colorful presentation on story maps. Viewers use the provided sentence frames to craft a sample story as guided practice. They then draft their own stories to share with the...

Shake it up! Shake your tablet to bring up a unique writing prompt for journaling or blogging with your class. Shake again and a new one appears. Prompts can come from different categories (sketches, scenes, texts, words, news) to help...

Review the narrative writing process with your emerging story writers. They read a sample narrative and identify five vague verbs that could be replaced with a more exact, exciting verb. Then they write a personal narrative making sure...

Fifth graders develop and practice the steps involved in imaginative writing. They follow the steps/worksheets included and write imaginative stories of their own.

Young writers can contemplate a cartoon zombie's brain while they write a creative story. The theme is Halloween and the issue is that the writer invited real monsters to his or her party. Big mistake! Or was it?

Get your ghouls and gals writing on Halloween! Learners write about what their jack o' lantern said when it suddenly came to life. A cute pumpkin graphic and a fun font spices up the resource.