Curated OER
Nellie Bly's Newspaper Club: Introducing the Science of Writing
Students evaluate a video about Nellie Bly, a famous reporter from the 19th century. They consider what makes a high-interest news article, write an essay in pairs and present it a literary tea.
Scholastic
Smart Quotes Mini-Lesson
Prepare for an interview project with a set of worksheets about asking questions and quoting people. After completing a grammar exercise about quotation marks, kids write out the questions they want to ask their interviewee, and record...
Scholastic
Lesson 2: Values and Barriers
Scholars investigate and discuss the importance of values and how they can be used to break barriers. Small groups work collaboratively to examine the text and draw inferences to answer questions. A writing assignment challenges pupils...
Curated OER
Character Builder
Characters in a story are more than a name to remember. Use a character builder worksheet to write out a character's appearance, background, personality, attributes, and story relevance, including whether they are a main or minor...
Bright Hub Education
Find Future Employment Ideas by Writing a Career Essay
Use the constructive ideas in this resource to assist in developing your own career writing project for your junior high or young high school scholars. The resource provides step-by-step plans for the educator and learners, as well as...
Virginia Department of Education
Developing an essay: Using specific nouns, strong verbs, and vivid adjectives
Feeling bored and unimpressed with word choice in your class? If so, consider this activity, which focuses on using specific and precise language. Pupils use highlighters, brainstorm independently and in small groups, and create a poster...
Virginia Department of Education
The Writing Process for Expository Writing
Struggling on what steps to take in your expository essay lesson? Or confused on what to include for your scribes? This exercise in the process of expository writing provides concepts and structure for the educator on what the writers...
Museum of Tolerance
Family Role Model Activity
What does is take to be a role model? Through grand conversation, and the use of books and a graphic organizer, scholars find out and apply the requirements to identify a role model within their family. They then journey through the...
Teach Hub
New Year’s Resolution Classroom Activity
Create a sense of accountability among scholars with a lesson that focuses on making and keeping New Year's resolutions. Writers compose a five paragraph essay focused on three resolutions—promises to self improvement, to their family,...
Curated OER
Critical Thinking & Writing: Brainstorming
Have your young writers organize their thoughts before writing. They generate ideas through various brainstorming activities prior to writing a mock feature news story for USA Today. A series of USA Today articles debating the level of...
Curated OER
Outlining Essays (Grades 3-6)
Students brainstorm story idea in preparation of writing an expressive essay. They study how to outline essays to assist them in writing an expressive essay. Each students conclusion should summarize their main idea and restate their...
Curated OER
Planning Your Essay
Young scholars discover how to organize essays effectively. In this writing lesson, students construct a spider map to develop their ideas for an essay.
Curated OER
The Hamburger Essay - AKA The Sandwich Essay
Students discuss how a five paragraph essay has five basic parts. They compare this to a well-made hamburger. They create a mind map of a five paragraph essay using the graphic of a tasty hamburger sandwich.
Curated OER
Writing - The Persuasive Essay
Students, in groups, work together to develop a five-paragraph essay that defends the group's viewpoint on an assigned topic. Each student in the group writes one paragraph.
Curated OER
A Pill with a View
Students brainstorm a list of potential uses for micro-video technologies. After reading an article, they analyze the development of a new pill-sized camera. In groups, they create a children's book that shows them the various systems of...
Curated OER
Trek Across America
Bring a time machine into your classroom with this writing lesson plan, in which young writers project themselves back in time and have a variety of choices from that point forward. They either write a conversation with a historical...
Chicago Botanic Garden
Causes and Effects of Climate Change
Wrap-up a unit on global climate change with a lesson that examines the causes and effects of climate change. Learners fill out a chart that represents what they think causes climate change—natural and human-based—and what they think...
Do2Learn
Organizer Tree
Help your pupils organize their thoughts, gain a greater understanding of a topic by laying it out clearly, or plan for writing with this graphic organizer. Learners can write in three larger topics and then two subtopics for each.
App State
Brainstorming
Get your young writers outside of the traditional essay writing mode with Free Write Friday. Free Write Friday encourages your class to use personal experiences or knowledge to write more creative pieces. Young writers could experiment...
Curated OER
Who Am I? - Brainstorming
Students brainstorm lists of places, events and relationships that define them. They search for clip art and pictures in magazines to illustrate the items on their list and create a graphic timeline of their lives.
Curated OER
Organizational Patterns: Comparison and Contrast Writing
Middle schoolers write an essay comparing and contrasting their school experiences. Through guided practice, they create an outline of their elementary school experience and middle school experience. Using their outlines, students...
Curated OER
Foundation work for writing
In this writing worksheet, students read and practice the correct steps on how to write a good report. Students read a total of eight steps.
Curated OER
Living History
Students write an essay and interview someone who remembers the 1960's and 1970's. In this history lesson plan, students write their essays as if they were there in that time period, write their feelings, and put together a mini museum...
Smithsonian Institution
Art to Zoo: Life in the Promised Land: African-American Migrants in Northern Cities, 1916-1940
This is a fantastic resource designed for learners to envision what it was like for the three million African-Americans who migrated to urban industrial centers of the northern United States between 1910 and 1940. After reading a...