YAM Contest and Writing Stories about the "Wild West"

If you're looking to start a unit based around narrative writing, make sure to consider this resource while you're planning. This book covers five topics: writing personal narratives, writing narratives about others, writing narratives...

Master a well-organized thesis statement with a short activity for a persuasive writing unit. Young writers read five different introductory paragraphs about various topics, find the main ideas addressed in each thesis statement, and jot...

Story chains connect literary concepts, reinforce context clues, and even help learners predict what's coming next! Using words from the next chapter of Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons, middle schoolers craft story chains to determine...

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.

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...

All ages love to engage in cartoon writing –- little do they know that they actually learn quite a bit from it! In an instructional session focused on literacy syntax and vocabulary, your pupils work cooperatively to draw six pictures...

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...

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...

"But I don't know what to write about!" Now, there's a very familiar complaint. And here's a very creative solution. Young authors are given a writing prompt chart, spin three wheels that provide suggestions for the who, what, and where...