An extensive portfolio project encourages your kids to reflect on their personalities with multiple writing assignments. From activities on extended metaphors to writing about an important day in their lives, kids explore the way they...

Keep your class in conversation with others across the country or across the sea by writing letters to pen pals. The activity calls for students to be pan pals with pupils in Africa; however, the listed steps could be used for any...

A good prompt is hard to find, especially ones that encourage application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of a text. Help is here in the form of a prompt list for George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four that offers essay topics that...

Tap into the wisdom and knowledge of older members of the community with this New York Times plan. To warm up, learners write about and discuss advice they have been given. After reading "The Life Report," an op-ed column that asks older...

Do some good with social media. Secondary scholars participate in a live Twitter chat focusing on social justice issues. The thought-provoking activity allows academics to set up a live chat, create responses, and express their personal...

Technology or engineering teams are given a task to design, construct, and test the efficiency of a structure that will foster an even temperature throughout an entire sunny day. Intended as a long-term project, pupils research, plan,...

What are the benefits of kindness and integrity? When is it difficult to be honest? Through discussion, writing, and hands-on experiences, your young learners will consider the definitions and importance of having honesty and integrity...

Focus on plot and the impact-specific events in The Cay. Class members use their double-entry journals, created in a previous lesson in this series, to record their thinking about the guiding question as they read chapters 15 through 17....

Encourage your learners to examine the setting in Theodore Taylor's The Cay. Pupils work in small groups to put together a description of the setting before reading two more chapters of the book. They use their double-entry journals to...

An activity promotes reading comprehension. Readers analyze a text of their choice while activating prior knowledge and asking and answering questions. Scholars enforce multiple strategies to improve comprehension.

Characters often change over the course of a story or novel. Use the sample graphic organizer provided here to track how the narrator has responded to the sequence of events in chapter four through six of The Cay. In addition to this...

Students create lists about a topic that they choose to generate ideas for writing without worrying about grammar or punctuation. In this lists lesson plan, students first create a list about snow with their teacher.

This site is filled with several journal writing ideas. Students and teachers can benefit from this comprehensive list of journal writing suggestions.

Explore the world of journal writing with this valuable lesson plan filled with suggestions.

This site has hundreds of writing prompts/journal topics to get students started writing. Topics like "what is" and "what if" will get students thinking about what they could write.

As part of a revision and close reading section of BBC Bitesize, this site presents information on personal writing with six key features listed. The information is included as part of a brief series on the autobiography.

What interesting and unusual items might you write a Lost & Found Ad for? Devote a page in your journal or writer's notebook to write several unusual Lost & Found Ads this year. Use the lost and found writing prompt generator to...