Poetry4kids
Playing With Your Food Poem Lesson
What's more fun than playing with your food? Writing a poem about it! A quick and straightforward lesson guides young writers through the steps of writing a funny, well-structured poem about combining sports and food.
EngageNY
Analyzing the Author’s Perspective: “The Shakespeare Shakedown”
Simon Schama's article "The Shakespeare Shakedown" allows young writers to see how authors respond to conflicting viewpoints. Class members participate in discussion appointments with five peers to explore the author's point of view.
EngageNY
Character Confessions: Peer Critique of Narratives
Shake up the writing process with a peer critique. The second of four lessons in the Grade 8 ELA Module 2B, Unit 3 series first has young writers compare their interpretations of a scene from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's...
EngageNY
Research: Paraphrasing Relevant Information
Young writers practice paraphrasing information from Truth in Advertising? They keep an eye out for examples of false advertising as they read, recording ideas and information in their researcher's notebook along the way.
EngageNY
Writing the Children’s Book: Day Two
Following a brief mini-instructional activity on using dialogue in fiction, young writers continue day two of their writing workshop. They work on the second half of their Children's Book Storyboards, and then they turn and talk with...
K20 LEARN
Who Am I? Creating And Editing Descriptive Writing
With descriptive writing, the pleasure is in the details. Young writers learn how to add sensory details to a paragraph about themselves. They read a short paragraph and identify the sensory details used. After revising their draft...
K20 LEARN
What Do You Want To Talk About? Writing Dialogue
Pictures really do talk in a lesson that teaches young writers how to craft dialogues. Class members closely examine Grant Wood's American Gothic, imagine what the couple might think or feel, and put these words to paper, crafting a...
K20 LEARN
Is Pizza Epic? Word Choice
Remember when everything was Fantastic! Fabulous! Awesome! Iconic! A series of activities encourages young writers to move beyond these overused descriptors and instead choose a more precise language.
Curated OER
Memory Book
Young writers create memory books. They think of important events in their lives from the past year. Then they draw pictures that depict these events, and dictate captions to an adult who writes them down in their books for them. These...
Curated OER
Scripting the Past: Exploring Women's History Through Film
Explore women's history through films and filmmaking. An innovative research project prompts class members to create their own screenplay about a figure in women's history. After outlining their characters, settings, and plots, young...
Curated OER
Trek Across America
Bring a time machine into your classroom with this writing lesson, in which young writers project themselves back in time and have a variety of choices from that point forward. They either write a conversation with a historical figure,...
Education World
Every Day Edit - Gwendolyn Brooks, Poet
In this editing activity about Gwendolyn Brooks, young writers read and then correct grammatical mistakes in a short paragraph. The errors range from punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar.
Curated OER
Countables and Uncountables Exercise 1
Young writers determine whether the 19 nouns in the box are accountable or uncountable. They place each noun in the Venn Diagram and then fill in each blank in 9 sentences with the words a, an, any and/or some. A good worksheet!
San José State University
The Quotation Mark
Review where quotation marks belong and what they are used to indicate. From direct speech to in-text citations, young writers will find this worksheet quite useful. Several exercises at the bottom, along with a key, give learners...
K12 Reader
Describe It with Adjectives
Put children's descriptive writing skills to the test with these fun collaborative writing activities. Presented with the picture of an object, young writers are are tasked with creating a description that provides enough detail for...
Media Smarts
The Newspaper Front Page
Hot off the presses! A perfect instructional activity idea for a journalism class or even a language arts class looking to incorporate some informational texts. Young writers analyze the front pages of various newspapers to determine the...
Curated OER
Social Studies: Essay Outline
Here is a resource intended for a social studies class, but great no matter the subject. It's a complete outline for an essay. It includes space to write ideas related to the thesis, supporting details, transition sentences and words,...
Curated OER
Essay Outline Template
The strength of this essay outline template is its specificity. By the time your young writers fill in the requested information, they are well on their way to compiling their multi-paragraph essay. Learners craft topic sentences,...
Curated OER
Checking Grammar: Accuracy
Get young writers in the practice of editing their work using this punctuation and grammar worksheet. They first read eight sentences with grammar issues, rewriting or checking off as correct. The sentence errors involve subject-verb...
Curated OER
g and q
Give printing practice a creative spin as young writers become familiar with the lowercase letters g and q. They trace each letter four times before printing a set on their own in the space provided. The fun twist is that...
Curated OER
Big, Bigger, Biggest
Which turtle is big, and which one is biggest? Add variety to your third graders' writing with a comparative adjective activity. Given eight adjectives, young writers find the comparative and superlative forms of each. The last two are...
Curated OER
Proofreading
Do your second graders like riddles? Give them a giggle and a lesson about proofreading at the same time. After reading two riddles, young writers fix punctuation and capitalization errors. They write the answer to each riddle at the...
Dorling Kindersley
Question Words
Teaching your primary learners how to ask questions? Then look no further. This worksheet introduces the six essential question words: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Children begin by practicing how to write these words, before...
Curated OER
Descriptive Writing Using the Book Rumpelstiltskin
Use the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin to teach your third grade class about descriptive writing. Following a teacher read-aloud of the story, the class brainstorms a list of adjectives describing the main character. Students use this list...