Brainstorm This!

As you work through Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, try out some or all of the 20 questions and activities included here. Useful for discussion questions, group assignments, or individual projects, this resource covers plot as...

You don't have to travel far to learn about rocks, just step outside, pick up a stone, and begin investigating. After taking a class walk around the school grounds collecting rocks, young scientists practice their skills of observation...

Prepare for any writing assignment with a series of prewriting activities. The resource includes instruction sheets, graphic organizers for brainstormng, and sample writing prompts.

Developing an informational text is like designing a building—if the structure is weak, it will not stand. A language arts video provides an overview of the five types of text structure. A catchy song and specific examples help give a...

Get your students writing, clear and organized stories with this PowerPoint. Students are taken through the brainstorming process by using a story web, they fill out what happened, where it happened, who was there, and how they felt....

Let your writers take a break from formal writing and experiment with undirected freewriting. First they'll discuss the difference between directed and undirected freewriting. Then they'll put their knowledge to work and create some...

As a class, 7th graders observe examples of brainstorming and then complete brainstorming worksheets themselves. They compose and describe planning strategies. Prior to writing an essay, they identify the purpose and the audience.

Get young writers thinking about how to write a great beginning for their narratives. After examining examples of strong beginnings in literary text, young writers discuss the criteria for a compelling introduction. Then, independently,...

Provide pupils samples of different types of poems including haikus, narrative, nonsense, shape, and rhyming poems. In groups, class members read the poems, establish their general meaning, identify poetic devices, and rate the poems,...

Fifth graders examine research writing. They begin by viewing models of sample research papers and discussing their components as compared to narrative fiction. Then they record their responses during independent writing time.