The strength of this peer editing learning exercise is that it addresses all the elements that should appear in a well-written essay. In addition, editors are encouraged to avoid one-word responses and instead, to make specific...

What is the missing link? Provide your class with this incomplete essay (it's missing transition words), and have writers place words from the transition word bank into the essay. Also, since only three of the five paragraphs are...

Students practice essay skills. In this essay skills lesson, students select an essay subject and take notes for their topic. Students create a web for their essays. Students organize, write, revise, and publish their essays.

Upper graders explore equality by writing an essay. They read the story Pink and Say by Patricia Polacco, and discuss the meaning of the story and its relevance to Civil War events. Learners investigate the five writing process steps and...

Are your learners working towards their GED? First they study the GED essay rubric, and then they read a sample essay as a group. After studying the basic elements, they write an essay of their own. After peer editing, they revise their...

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...

Reflection is a wonderful way to understand yourself as a learner or as an artist. Kids write a one-paragraph analysis of their own self-portrait. They focus on style, character traits, and self characterization.

After a review of the steps involved in writing a summary, class members read The Physics of Baseball by Sarah Ives and use a story web to identify the important details to include in their summary. Class members then choose an article...

Learners examine the procedures that writers utilize to obtain and develop ideas for writing. Journal writing is fostered as a primary step in the writing process. Learners are encouraged to pay careful attention to using complete...

How do you read when you know you're going to be summarizing a text? Summarize a nonfiction text with your upper elementary schoolers. Your pupils independently read a nonfiction article and write a summary paragraph using the six-step...

Struggling on what steps to take in your expository essay lesson plan? Or confused on what to include for your scribes? This exercise in the process of expository writing provides concepts and structure for the educator on what the...

Need something for group work, homework, or a way to assess your learners on your lessons for Common Core skill RI.9-10.3? Then you have come to the right place because this multiple choice quiz challenges learners to analyze the...

Writers draft paragraphs comparing and contrasting the author's viewpoint in two poems. They also discuss the differences between an informational text and a poem regarding manners. Rubric and assessment are provided.

Fourth and fifth graders practice the skill of organizing their writing to convey a central idea by sorting 14 facts about the dogwood tree into four categories of facts. The categories, which are written on the board, are; Governmental...

Students examine the use of transition or signal word to create good paragraph organization.

Using PowerShow.com, this presentation focuses on how to write basic introductions including four main points: create an opening sentence that sizzles, identify a clear, central idea, relate the topic's importance, and write a solid...

Have your class learn about marine life. Learners write a story about a fish, create an art project, and share their work with the class. This experience could be enhanced by having them conduct Internet research to discover some of the...

This lesson plan, which promises to improve the essays of your middle schoolers, contains a list of characteristics an essay should include. It breaks it down into the introduction, thesis statement, body, etc. There's also a list of...

Encourage focus and organization in the writing of your second, third, and fourth grade classes. Learners are asked to select a room in their house and narrow in on how it looks, smells, or feels. After writing a short paragraph...

Make analyzing the sequence of events in an informational text easy. Ask readers to craft a one-sentence summary of each paragraph in a document and create a text map. To demonstrate their understanding of the process, participants read...

A set of very useful posters (in PDF) describing different types of non-fiction texts is here for you. While there isn't an activity, per se, in these worksheets, they could be used as a handy reference for learners who are engaging in...

Play with words and word meanings involving the suffix -er. After reading a sample list of words, young readers look up each one in the dictionary to decide which words refer to people, animals, or objects, or have three or more...

Designed to accompany An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, this powerpoint addresses a number of language, technological, and sociological topics. The slides could be helpful in either a...

Happy birthday! Celebrate everyone's birthday with this writing activity, which prompts seventh graders to research historical events in a country at the time of their birth to create an essay. Working in pairs, they proofread each...