Writing Is Rough

Looking for suggestions on how to organize a creating writing workshop? For topic suggestions appropriate for various grade levels? Check out a resource packet, designed for English language arts instructors, that is packed with ideas...

Have your class write adventure stories. In a step-by-step manner, learners discuss techniques that can be used to make their stories interesting and complete. They analyze the purpose of the story, the ways they can generate excitement,...

Ease young writers into the process of writing a story with a colorful presentation on story maps. Viewers use the provided sentence frames to craft a sample story as guided practice. They then draft their own stories to share with the...

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...

Review the narrative writing process with your emerging story writers. They read a sample narrative and identify five vague verbs that could be replaced with a more exact, exciting verb. Then they write a personal narrative making sure...

Have young pumpkin carvers use technology to create a unique pumpkin face and write a short story about the special characteristics of their pumpkin.

After listening to the story, The Best Part of Me, learners will identify a positive physical feature of themselves, and create a descriptive poem about their favorite feature. Photographs are taken, and a nice final draft of the poem is...

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...

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.

Alliterative adjective nicknames generate stories inspired by Rosemary Wells' book Noisy Nora (also a thematic complement to any class with children who make a ruckus to get attention). Class members explore basic story elements --...