Have your older students assist young children with writing in this community service and literacy activity. Middle schoolers become partners with a local elementary school. They assist the grade school children in writing a pattern book...

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...

Use consonant digraphs to introduce learners to word patterns and high frequency words. They observe a chart with the digraphs /sh/, /ch/, /th/, and /wh/. After listening to each of these phonemes, scholars watch as the teacher...

A comprehensive and immersive series of lessons that examines various aspects of story development leads learners into writing a narrative of their own. Writers develop an understanding of the writing process as they use the learning...

Clear up confusion surrounding simple, compound, and complex sentences. The poster, which could also be used as a reference sheet, includes five examples. The types of clauses, parts of speech, and types of punctuation are color-coded to...

It's no secret that children can be very opinionated, but rather than fight against this natural tendency, embrace it with this primary grade writing project. After a shared reading of a children's book about...

Young scholars listen to Japanese folk songs to get inspired to create a writing piece about Japan.  In this writing lesson, students use primary and secondary sources to add information about Japan. 

Before learners become writers they need to feel comfortable moving a pencil from left to right in various patterns. Use these exercises to give budding printers some fine motor practice. They complete three patterns by tracing a dotted...

Organization is key in essay writing. The two organizational charts included in this resource model the block approach and the point-by-point approach to organizing a compare and contrast style essay. After examining the...

Students solve pentomino puzzles.  For this problem solving lesson, students discuss how pentomino puzzles play into the plot of Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett and practice solving a pentomino puzzle on their own....

Are you working on an autobiographical or narrative writing unit? Bring this lesson to your class, as it takes young writers through the process of drafting and sequencing an autobiography. After observing and demonstrating steps of the...

Teach your upper graders how to use an idea web to develop a topic for writing. After reading a variety of stories about friendship (a list of stories with the theme of friendship is included), model using an idea web. Class members...

Help your kindergartners master the number two! After tracing the number three times and writing it out three times, little learners count groups of animals and write the correct number in a box (the number is always two). Finally, they...

Do your young writers need a little help varying their sentence structure? Have them work on common errors, sentence fluency, and writing patterns with a series of language arts activities. The resource includes reading passages as well...

Looking for an organizational writing pattern to teach your class? Consider showing them how to structure a paragraph using the complexity of ideas as a guide. Provide the example included here to give them an idea of what is...

A haiku is the focus of an activity that challenges scholars to draft an original poem. Authors discover the origin and components of a haiku, read three example poems, then follow six steps to compose their own. 

Follow the format of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles with a journal-writing activity. Readers choose a character and examine the character's life and circumstances through brainstorming, research, and discussion before...

Young scholars write rhyming poems using rebus. With pictures instead of words, authors create original work about things they love. 

Convey the importance of sentence variety and introduce your class to different sentence patterns. Have class members take notes or take some breaks in the presentation to practice writing the variety of patterns introduced. 

Pass the time...creating rhymes! Writers connect rhyming words  with -ough in them, writing them as rhyming pairs. Next, they put their poetic skills to the test by applying the words in rhyming couplets. There is an example...

As guided practice, class members work together to revise a model persuasive paragraph. Then they practice independently with their own writing. The included rubric looks at prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, nonfiction text...

What happens when I add an 'e' to the word mad? It becomes made! Decoding and writing words with the silent e is the lesson plan for today. The class discusses what the e can do to a cvc word, then they practice adding e's to various...

Looking to improve your classes literacy program? Then look no further. This comprehensive collection of resources includes worksheets and activities covering everything from r-controlled vowels and consonant digraphs, to the...

In an ideal world, sentences in a college-level essay should feature a variety of sentence types. In reality, most papers stick to simple and compound sentences, two of the types a handout on sentence patterns discusses. Part of a larger...