Writing and Scholarship Planning For College-Bound Students: Overcome Writer's Block

Encourage narrative writing with a clever exercise. Class members watch episodes from movies and describe what happened to a character, including details about the setting, plot, and characters. Writers then craft a narrative about a...

Never again will you need to worry about coming up with a writing prompt! This packet contains, as it says, 501 prompts that are suitable for fourth graders on up. The prompts are paired into four categories (persuasive, expository,...

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...

Ah, the dreaded college application essay. Here's a unique approach to crafting a powerful personal essay. Class members read The Autobiography of Malcom X and Leslie Marmon Silko's Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, analyze the...

In this first lesson of the unit, class members continue to work on their draft of a narrative essay response to a prompt found on the college Common Application.

Built around a moving short film about second chances and tough choices, this instructional activity mixes grammar, prediction, and narrative writing. Pupils practice with adjectives and prefixes before moving on to the film. The...

A short film about music is the inspiration for a well-sequenced lesson that includes discussion, group work, and writing. After the whole class converses about music, small groups write narratives about a still from the film. Pupils...

Working in pairs, class members use the provided narrative writing rubric to assess the effectiveness of the use of dialogue, pacing, and description in two model paragraphs with similar content. Writers then use the insights they have...

Shake it up! Shake your tablet to bring up a unique writing prompt for journaling or blogging with your class. Shake again and a new one appears. Prompts can come from different categories (sketches, scenes, texts, words, news) to help...

The writing process meets the 21st century in this instructional activity centered around the Inspiration Software program. Using a diagram, learners complete the cyclical process through pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and...