Writing

We tell students to “show, not tell” in their writing, but this advice isn’t effective until they experience the difference. In this video, we’ll put a famous character (of students’ choosing) into a mundane situation and develop a fun scene to show off their main traits.

“Add more variety!” I’d say to my class. But I never really knew what this actually meant. Suprise! This bad advice never improved students’ writing. In these videos, students learn nine specific ways to add variety just by changing the beginning of their sentences. This was easily one of my students’ favorite writing tools – because it actually helped them.

Want students to understand how a paragraph fits together? Explode one and make them reassemble it using the clues in each sentence! I even wrote a little app to bust a paragraph up for you.

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

Let’s write the cleverest Mother’s Day cards you’ve ever seen!

Let’s see how propaganda techniques can make even something great seem bad.

We’ll take two seemingly unrelated pieces of content (say volcanoes and the human body) and then build analogies to connect the two ideas. In the end, students can create a skit, comic, or story relating the two concepts.

Dig into the common elements of the fantasy genre.

What if Kylo Ren wrote a love letter to Abe Lincoln or the Sahara Desert wrote one to the Moon?

Can your students come up with a one-syllable word to sum up their time away from school? And then rewrite The Beatles’ song Help!?

Students work with subjects, predicates, and conjunctions to write compound sentences.

When we try to solve a problem, sometimes we end up creating new problems. Which lead to new solutions. Which lead to new problems.

Let’s write a holiday song about order and chaos!

Ever ask students to create research questions? Were their ideas a bit… blah? My own students had a very hard time writing questions they didn’t already know the answer to! This video is how I solved that problem: upgrade research questions with depth and complexity.

Wouldn’t some holidays be better on a certain day of the week? Should Thanksgiving have a set date?

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

What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?

What if your students rewrote Dickens in the style of Hemingway and vice versa?

Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!

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

How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?

How would real people feel about the legends that have been created about them?

Starting with an old-timey photo, students will write from a particular item’s point of view.

What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?