CCSS ELA Standard: 5.W.4

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

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

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 help William Shakespeare with his use of repetition.

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

Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?

Which inventor and invention will win the tournament?

What if we rewrote a story’s climax into a totally different genre?

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

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

Which type of energy will win the tournament!?

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

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

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

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!?

Who will win in a tournament of eight plants with Interesting adaptations!?

Which location is the most wondrous place in the solar system?

Which of these eight wonders deserves to become the Eighth Wonder of the World!?

Which of these pieces of exploration technology is most important? Most underrated? Most long-lasting?

Eight types of precipitation battle it out in this tournament.

Which of these inventions of the ancient world is most influential? Least useful today? Most taken-for-granted?

Which animal has the most interesting, most valuable, or strangest adaptations?

Which object in the solar system is most habitable?

Which part of speech is most useful? Interesting? Strange?

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

So who was the strangest of these eight presidents?

Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.

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!)

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

Let’s take a classic Christmas poem and remix it to work with another holiday!

Want to move beyond memorizing the characteristics of biomes? In this lesson, students work through a Tournament of Biomes, explaining which biome wins in each round (based on criteria you choose). In the end, they crown a 👑 Champion Biome!

Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!

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.

What happens when a pronoun could refer to more than one noun? Big problems!

Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.

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.

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

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? Hmm…

Can you write directions so clear that a group of kids can put a toy together with no illustrations?

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.