Not just writing correctly, but writing interestingly!
Let's write a holiday song about order and chaos!
Part 5 of Holiday Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about โท๏ธ๐จ๏ธ๐ฒ๐ป๐ค
Part 4 of Holiday Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐ช๐ฅ๐๐พ๐ฆ
Part 3 of Holiday Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about โ๏ธ๐๐๏ธ๐ญโจ
Part 2 of Holiday Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐ ๐ท๐๐๐
Part 1 of Holiday Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐๐๐ค๐ถ๐ซฃ
Part 3 of Halloween Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐๐ฏ๏ธ๐๐ฅ๐ป.
Part 2 of Halloween Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐๐ฒ๐ฃ๐ฑ๐จ.
Part 1 of Halloween Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐ท๏ธ๐ธ๏ธ๐ฉ๐๐ช.
Part 12 of Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐ฆ๐๐๐ถ๐
Part 7 of Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐๐ฌโ๏ธ๐๏ธ ๐
Part 8 of Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐๐ค๐ป๐ธ๐
Part 9 of Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐๏ธ๐น๐๐ฆ๐ฅ
Part 10 of Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐ฐ๏ธ๐ฉ๐๐๐บ
Part 11 of Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐๏ธ๐ฎ๐ฉ๏ธ๐ท๐ฒ
Part 5 of Emoji Prompts
Students will write a story about ๐๐บ๏ธ๐๐๐
Part 4 of Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐ค๐๐ต๐บ๐.
Part 3 of Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐ป๐ฉ๐๏ธ๐ฐ๐คฃ.
Part 2 of Emoji Prompts
Students will create a story about ๐ฐ๐๐๐๐ช.
Part 6 of Emoji Prompts
Students will write a story about ๐ฅ๏ธ๐๐๐๐ค .
Part 10 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about Pluto back into the correct order?
Part 9 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about great sloths back into the correct order?
Part 6 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about The Moon back into the correct order?
Part 11 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about The Great Sphinx back into the correct order?
Part 8 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about rain clouds back into the correct order?
Part 7 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about the coral reef back into the correct order?
Let's write the cleverest Mother's Day cards you've ever seen!
What is bobbing for apples likeโฆ for an apple?
Part 4 of Super Specific Similes
Let's make this simile even more specific.
Let's go roller skating in a Halloween costume! What could possibly go wrong?
Part 3 of Super Specific Similes
Let's make this simile even more specific.
Part 1 of Super Specific Similes
Let's make this simile even more specific.
Part 2 of Super Specific Similes
Let's make that simile even more specific!
Part 4 of Super Specific Similes
Students will make their similes super specific.
Part 2 of Robot Writing
Read three pieces of writing from three different robots based on a beautiful painting and decide who wins!
Part 3 of Robot Writing
Read three pieces of writing from three different robots based on a beautiful painting and decide who wins!
Part 1 of Robot Writing
Read three pieces of writing from three different robots based on a beautiful painting and decide who wins!
Part 4 of Robot Writing
Read three pieces of writing from three different robots based on a beautiful painting and decide who wins!
What if your students rewrote Dickens in the style of Hemingway and vice versa?
Part 1 of Emoji Prompts
Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.
Let's write from multiple perspectives using an old timey holiday photo!
Students will look closely at this old image and write a short, structured poem.
Starting with an old-timey photo, students will write from a particular item's point of view.
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!?
Part 1 of Writing About Art
Students will create a pretty darn interesting poem about Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons.
Part 2 of Writing About Art
Students will create a surprisingly good poem based on Monet's Impression, Sunrise.
Part 3 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about automobiles back into the correct order?
Part 4 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about Washington, DC back into the correct order?
Part 5 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about trains back into the correct order?
Part 2 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about earthquakes back into the correct order?
Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?
Part 3 of Writing About Art
Get your students writing some pretty darn impressive poetry based on Japan's most famous artist.
Part 4 of Writing About Art
Students will look closely at a piece of art and then write a structured poem about it.
Part 5 of Writing About Art
Students will write about a beautiful painting from Frederic Edwin Church.
Part 2 of Fancier Figurative Language
Let's start with "As cold as fire."
Part 3 of Fancier Figurative Language
What if we started a sentence with the simile?
Part 6 of Writing About Art
Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.
Students will read three paragraphs about the same topic, decide what makes each one different, and then create a super-paragraph!
Students will read three paragraphs about the same topic, decide what makes each one different, and then create a super-paragraph!
Students will read three paragraphs about the same topic, decide what makes each one different, and then create a super-paragraph!
Students will read three paragraphs about the same topic, decide what makes each one different, and then create a super-paragraph!
Students will read three paragraphs about the same topic, decide what makes each one different, and then create a super-paragraph!
What happens when we switch out a "but" with a "so"? An "and" with a "for"? How can such tiny words make such big differences?
Part 5 of Spice Up Your Writing
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!
Part 4 of Spice Up Your Writing
Repeating words can be what you want, if what you want is an interesting effect. (Psst, that's an example of anadiplosis!)
Can your students help The Bard? We'll fix five Shakespearean run-ons in three different ways.
Part 3 of Spice Up Your Writing
A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We'll be writing sentences with three dependent clauses.
Part 1 of Spice Up Your Writing
A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We'll be contrasting two ideas using synonyms.
Part 2 of Spice Up Your Writing
A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We'll be using antonyms to describe the same topic!
What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?
Rather than just demand that students "write clearly," we'll explore the hazards of poorly written sentencesโฆ and maybe create one of our own!
Let's take a classic Christmas poem and remix it to work with another holiday!
Want something to do during the holiday season that is both fun and involves thinking? Get students writing about what a snowman would think about Halloween or what a ghost would think about Thanksgiving.
In a sentence, punctuation may seem meek when compared to those mighty words, but punctuation has incredible power over the meaning of a sentence. Students will try re-punctuating sentences to find new meanings - without changing a single word!
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!
Part 1 of Mixed Up Paragraphs
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.
Part 4 of Fancier Figurative Language
Is your students' use of repetition limited to, "The girl was very, very, very fast."? Let's borrow some ideas from Shakespeare!
Part 5 of Fancier Figurative Language
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.
Ever ask students to create research questions? Were their ideas a bitโฆ 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.
What happens when a pronoun could refer to more than one noun? Big problems!
Imagine that Poetry and Prose meet for the first time at a party? What would they say to each other? How would they feel? In this video, I guide kids through the process of writing a script in which these two forms of writing interact.
Upgrade compare and contrast writing with just a couple of key words.
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.
What if... Edgar Allen Poe wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
n this lesson, students will not just fix passive sentences, but break active sentences as they learn to put the star of the sentence first.
Context clues lessons can be a disaster. Here, we expose students to a delightful classic packed with nonsense words ("Jabberwocky") and ask them to decipher the meanings and parts of speech. Then, it's only natural for students to write their own nonsense poems.
Let's see how propaganda techniques can make even something great seem bad.
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.
What if Kylo Ren wrote a love letter to Abe Lincoln or the Sahara Desert wrote one to the Moon?
Ready to push kids beyond the boring, old ABAB rhyme scheme and into something a bit more complex?
Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!
Part 3 of Ways To Start Sentences
We'll show students how to add more variety to their writing by starting sentences with gerunds, participle phrases, and absolute phrases.
Part 2 of Ways To Start Sentences
We'll show students how to add more variety to their writing by starting sentences with a reason, a prepositional phrase, and a simile.
Part 1 of Ways To Start Sentences
"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.
Let's write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.
Did you ever notice that the structure of an essay is very similar to the structure of a paragraph? Hmmโฆ
Part 1 of Fancier Figurative Language
We'll start with the clichรฉ "as cold as ice" and go somewhere much more interesting.
Can you write directions so clear that a group of kids can put a toy together with no illustrations?
Part 5 of Writing Better Stories
Ever read a student's story that was just event after event after event and then a very sudden ending? They lack an understanding of a plot's structure. With the help of Finding Nemo, I break down how to set up a well-structured plot.
Part 2 of Writing Better Stories
If your students' stories are packed with endless ninja fights or arguments between frenemies, it's time to expose them to a wider range of conflicts.
Part 3 of Writing Better Stories
A typical student narrative includes plot and characters but lacks a larger idea to hold it all together. This is where a lesson on themes comes inโฆ
Part 1 of Writing Better Stories
We open our unit on narrative writing with a big idea: "structure increases creativity." I show how this is true by bringing in examples from across all disciplines.
Part 4 of Writing Better Stories
Are students' characters a bit flat? Archetypes give them a strong foundation on which to build their own characters as well as a tool to analyze existing stories.