Arizona ELA Standard: 3.L.3.a

When does a simple symbol have more power than a word?

When I see a quote, I often think, “That’s not quite right!”

How many different ways can we use the word “care”? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!

How many different ways can we use the word “fruit”? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!

How many different ways can we use the word “change”? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!

Let’s make this simile about a loud class super specific!

Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

Look closely at Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. What do you notice? Now turn those details into a poem you didn’t know you could write.

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

Get your students writing some pretty darn impressive poetry based on Japan’s most famous artist.

What if we started a sentence with the simile?

Have students mastered the art of anadiplosis: ending one sentence with the beginning of the next? Now it’s time to take it to the next level!

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!

Students use 12 random phrases to create a story that takes place at the zoo.

Aristotle noted that positive traits and negative traits are often the same thing, but just in different amounts. The right amount is a virtue, but too much or too little and it’s a vice.

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.

Sure, Dr. Seuss wrote for young students, but can older students analyze his writing and learn to mimic his style? THEN, they can produce Seuss-style poetry about any topic: Ancient China, the electromagnetic spectrum, Pride and Prejudice, and (yes) fraction division!

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.)

Your students’ sentences all start the same way. Here are three techniques that fix that overnight.

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.