CCSS ELA Standard: 5.W.5

13 colonies activities including a word search and task cards packed with facts. Plus, students will create their own colony with a name, story, and map!

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s make this simile about a strong uncle even more specific.

Students will make this slimy broccoli simile seriously specific.

Let’s make this simile about a quick baby even more specific.

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

Students will make this simile about stinky seaweed super specific.

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

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!?

Students will create a pretty darn interesting poem about Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons.

Students will create a surprisingly good poem based on Monet’s Impression, Sunrise.

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.

Students will look closely at a piece of art and then write a structured poem about it.

Students will write about a beautiful painting from Frederic Edwin Church.

Let’s start with “As cold as fire.”

What if we started a sentence with the simile?

Can your students help The Bard? We’ll fix five Shakespearean run-ons in three different ways.

A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We’ll be writing sentences with three dependent clauses.

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!

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 sentences… and maybe create one of our own!

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

What would an igneous rock be like? Would it get along with a sedimentary rock? Could they handle the hot personality of a metamorphic rock?

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.

In this lesson, students will not just fix passive sentences, but break active sentences as they learn to put the star of the sentence first.

After watching some great presenters, let’s outline your presentation!

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

We’ll show students how to add more variety to their writing by starting sentences with gerunds, participle phrases, and absolute phrases.

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!” 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.

Did you ever notice that the structure of an essay is very similar to the structure of a paragraph? Hmm…