What's A Word?

Write a story as a class.  In this writing lesson, each person takes turns writing one to two sentences onto the paragraph given about Kim the Kiwi bird, including characters and events.  Altogether, brainstorm a title for the...

A short story is only as strong as its characters, development, and conflicts. Encourage the young authors in your class to plan their stories based on the elements of narrative writing, all provided in brainstorming graphic organizers.

Do your young authors suffer from writer's block when they try to write short stories? Access their natural creativity with C-Gor, the writing monster! The instructional activity takes aspiring authors through a new writing process...

"The Dinner Party" is the anchor text in a lesson designed to encourage writers to use sensory details in their stories. After brainstorming descriptive words and phrases for the five senses, class members read Mona Gardner's...

Readers reflect on enjoyable stories they know, brainstorm criteria that make a story "good," analyze a New York Times article about innovative children's performances, re-envision classics on their own, and peer edit drafts. Use this as...

Help your middle-schoolers expand their writing skills with this lesson on episodic writing, which focuses on story details, idea development, and organization. After reading "The Eighth Picture: End of Summer" from Patricia Reilly...

Using Movie Maker, sixth graders make an eight frame movie based on a story they have written. They choose music clips, select pictures from PowerPoint, and make their movie. The lesson should take about ten days to complete.

Why didn't Rapunzel's hair stop growing?  Why did it take the fairy godmother so long to intervene in Cinderella's affairs? Young writers consider unanswered questions like these and compose news articles investigating the true...

Young writers can contemplate a cartoon zombie's brain while they write a creative story. The theme is Halloween and the issue is that the writer invited real monsters to his or her party. Big mistake! Or was it?

Get your ghouls and gals writing on Halloween! Learners write about what their jack o' lantern said when it suddenly came to life. A cute pumpkin graphic and a fun font spices up the resource.