Alabama ELA Standard: 7.VL.32

Let’s take a starting phrase about St. Patrick’s Day and get specific. No, even more specific!

Start with a basic simile. Now make it more specific. Now even more. Watch how much better writing gets with each round.

Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?

Let’s start with “As cold as fire.”

What if we started a sentence with the simile?

Repeating words can be what you want, if what you want is an interesting effect. (Psst, that’s an example of anadiplosis!)

A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We’ll be contrasting two ideas using synonyms.

A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We’ll be using antonyms to describe the same topic!

Asking students to “think creatively” won’t get you far. They won’t know how to start, they’ll get stuck with simple ideas, or they’ll just go completely wild. SCAMPER is a tool for scaffolding the process of creativity.

Is your students’ use of repetition limited to, “The girl was very, very, very fast.”? Let’s borrow some ideas from Shakespeare!

When students learn about alliteration, it’s hard to steer them away from goofy tongue-twisters. Certainly, there must be more powerful and practical ways of using alliteration. In this lesson, I draw on delicious examples from Shakespeare to show how a very advanced writer used alliteration. Then, I break those ideas down so students can try them out.

When students are told that they’re “smart”, what does this word actually mean to them? (Psst. It isn’t what we intended.)

Upgrade compare and contrast writing with just a couple of key words.

We’ll show students how to add more variety to their writing by starting sentences with a reason, a prepositional phrase, and a simile.

‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.

Bored with typical spelling studies? Let’s dig into the origins of common English words from other languages!

We’ll start with the cliché “as cold as ice” and go somewhere much more interesting.